Netflix · created by Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams
Where was Ozark filmed?
The Blue Cat Lodge was a set, and you can have dinner in it. The lodge on the water in the first season was built at a working marina in Canton, Georgia, and when the production had no further use for it the marina kept it standing and opened it as a restaurant. It trades as J.D.'s on the Lake, with the production's signs and props still in place. The resort it was modelled on sits 860 kilometres away in Missouri, on the real Lake of the Ozarks, and nothing was filmed there.
30
places on the route
Twenty-seven filming locations in Georgia and one afternoon in Missouri. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where was Ozark filmed? In Georgia, over four seasons between 2017 and 2022. The lake in the title is Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri, and the water on screen is two federal reservoirs north of Atlanta: Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier. Netflix publishes this itself and gets it out of the way in its first line: the series was not filmed in the Ozarks, some shots of the real lake are used, and most of the work happened in Georgia. Which shots, it does not say.
The map has a shape to it, and the shape is a show moving away from its own premise. The first season is on water: two reservoirs, two marinas, a road of lakeside houses, a park on a river, a barbecue place on a highway. By the fourth, the production is filming Mexico in a shopping centre in Chamblee, Chicago in a city park, Kansas City in a bar on Howell Mill Road, and a casino on a riverboat that has not sailed in years. An Ozark filming locations map is a map of Georgia with a single dot in Missouri, and the Missouri dot is one afternoon.
The Ozark filming locations below come mostly from one list, published by the state's tourism office in February 2022, and sixteen of them rest on that list and on nothing else. Some of it you can walk into: the lodge serves food, the drive-in runs four screens, the dive bar has a band most nights. The house the Byrdes live in is somebody's home, and the pin for it stops at the road.
filmed herewhere the story is set
The lake is two lakes
Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier
Lake Allatoona in November. On screen this water is the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri.
Cherokee, Bartow and Cobb Counties; Hall, Forsyth, Gwinnett and Dawson Counties, Georgia
Two reservoirs 65 kilometres apart do the work of one lake. Lake Allatoona carried the first season, the marinas and the Blue Cat. Lake Lanier carried the house and a good deal of the rest, and the production was still working around it in the summer of 2021, on the last season.
Both are US Army Corps of Engineers water, which means each is a river with a dam across it. So is the lake they stand in for: the row of shops at Lake Ozark, Missouri is named after the dam at the end of it. That is the closest thing to a family resemblance these three bodies of water have.
The state's tourism office says outright that Allatoona stands in for the Lake of the Ozarks, and gives it more than 320 kilometres of shoreline and about 49 square kilometres of water. Canton's city tourism office, which is a different organisation, describes the same water and the same restaurant. Two boards, two lists, one lake, and on this point they agree.
Lanier is thinner in the record. The Gainesville paper wrote in 2021 that the series did much of its filming in Hall County around the lake, and the city's tourism office says several homes on the shore were used. Which homes, apart from the road below, nobody names.
The first season also used a second marina on Allatoona, Victoria Harbour, four kilometres from the Blue Cat by road or by boat, with a restaurant on the dock called the Sunset Grille. The state's list gives it the season and stops: no scene, no episode, no second source. It is also the weakest coordinate here. The marina is not in the open map data at all, so its pin is set from a photograph taken on the spot in September 2025 and is good to about a hundred metres.
Little River Marina, and the set that stayed
Floating walkways on the Little River arm of Lake Allatoona, 260 metres from the marina that carried the Blue Cat Lodge.
Marty Byrde and his family turn up at the Blue Cat in the opening episodes and start getting the measure of it. The state's list says the marina was used for interiors as well as exteriors through those episodes.
Then the substitution ran backwards. The Blue Cat Lodge set was left standing when the production finished with it, and it reopened as a working restaurant with the show's signs on the walls. Everywhere else on this page a real place was dressed as a fictional one. Here a fictional one was undressed into a real place, and it is the one you can order from.
Canton's tourism office calls J.D.'s on the Lake a seasonal restaurant, so a visit in February may find the door shut. The marina prints its address as 6986 Bells Ferry Road; the city's tourism office prints 6979. We take the number from the people who own the dock.
The house
Gaines Ferry Road
Van Pugh Park on Lake Lanier, the nearest public shore to the private houses on Gaines Ferry Road.
Flowery Branch, South Hall County. Private houses. The pin stops at the road.
The Ozark house filming location is a road, and the road is as close as this page will take you.
For four years the production worked at properties along Gaines Ferry Road. The local paper measured what that costs a neighbourhood in ruts: a lift was parked halfway into the road for a week, drivers went round it for a week, and the surface was chewed up where they went. That photograph ran in February 2017. Hall County then set about drafting an ordinance to cover what film crews do to a neighbourhood.
These are lived-in houses with families in them. The street number is not published here, and the pin sits on the road rather than on any one driveway.
Four kilometres away, on the Atlanta Highway, is the other South Hall address anyone has named. In October 2016 the Gainesville paper reported that an upcoming Netflix series would shoot a scene at a Flowery Branch barbecue restaurant in the coming weeks. That is an announcement, not evidence, and for five years it was all there was. Then the same paper went back over all four seasons and named Moonie's Texas Barbecue among the principal locations, in the same breath as the houses on Gaines Ferry Road, quoting the president of the Lake Lanier visitors bureau. So it was used. What was shot inside, and which episode it is in, nobody has written down.
What else the first season could reach
A river park, a barbecue joint, a diner and a resort
Jones Bridge Park on the Chattahoochee, which is River Light Rapids in season one, episode four.
Peachtree Corners, Marietta, Midtown Atlanta and Braselton
Season one, episode four, wants white water, and gets it at Jones Bridge Park, a twelve-hectare county park on the Chattahoochee that stands in for River Light Rapids. It is free to walk into. The same episode puts a restaurant on screen that the state's list identifies as Williamson Bros. Bar-B-Q in Marietta, without saying what the place is playing. What the list does say is that Williamson Bros opened in 1990 down the road from the Big Chicken, and then it has to stop and explain to its own readers that the Big Chicken is a landmark fried chicken sign.
Episode eight has a diner and a resort. The diner is the Silver Skillet, which has been on 14th Street for more than fifty years, and which the same list also credits in Remember the Titans, The Founder and Anchorman 2. The resort is Château Élan, 60 kilometres out in the north Georgia foothills, where the production used a guest room, a cabana by the pool, the restaurant and the bar. All of it inside. The photograph on this page shows the winery building on its hill, which is the place but not the thing that was filmed, and the estate runs tours and tastings every day.
Four places, one season, and between them they cover a river, a highway, a city street and a hotel corridor. That is the width of the first season's Missouri.
Three addresses with no scene attached
Downtown Lawrenceville. The production worked here in February 2017; what it shot is not recorded.
Lawrenceville, Duluth and Peachtree Corners, Gwinnett County
Some of the record is just a name in a newspaper, and pretending otherwise would be inventing.
The Atlanta paper reported filming in downtown Lawrenceville in the first week of February 2017, on the word of the city manager, and what was shot there is not recorded. The same article says parts of the series were filmed in Duluth and Canton in 2016. Canton we can point at, and Duluth is a name inside a sentence with no building attached to it. A year later the same paper, working from a city Facebook post, put two days of second-season filming at 25 Technology Parkway, on 29 and 30 January 2018. That work was indoors. Outside it is an office and light industrial street with nothing to look at, and the pin sits on the street rather than on the building.
Three pins, three sources, no scenes. They are here because a source puts the production there, and that is all they are.
Off the water
Season one is playing the Ozarks. Seasons three and four are playing everywhere else: Mexico twice, Chicago, Kansas City, and a casino floating on a boat that no longer goes anywhere.
The Missouri Belle is two places
A paddle-wheeler under way on Stone Mountain Lake in 2005, when the park's riverboats were still working.
Stone Mountain, DeKalb County, and River Street, Savannah
The boat is a retired riverboat moored at Stone Mountain Park, dressed with Missouri Belle signs. The state's list puts it in the plural, the former riverboats at the park, and does not say which hull wore the name. The park charges admission, and visitors are asked to photograph the boat from the shore and not to go aboard.
The two photographs on this page show a white paddle-wheeler under way on the park's lake in 2005 and a decommissioned paddle steamer tied up among the trees in 2024. Whether that is the same hull, we cannot tell you. Neither picture has a Missouri Belle sign on it.
The interiors are the part nobody will account for. A St. Louis television station reported that the casino rooms were not filmed on the boat at all, passing on what the producers had told an entertainment website. That is second-hand twice over, and the station names no alternative address. Neither does anyone else we read. So the most-seen room in the last two seasons is a room with no location at all.
The water outside the casino is in a third place again. The Big Muddy's waterfront is River Street in Savannah, about 360 kilometres south-east of Atlanta and a long way from the rest of this page. The state's list is careful here and says some of the scenes were added digitally. What is genuinely there is the cobbled riverfront and the cruise boats that work it.
Two Mexicos
The front of Westview Abbey in Atlanta. In the show this is the Navarro estate in Mexico.
1680 Westview Drive SW, Atlanta, and Chamblee, DeKalb County
The Navarro estate, the grand Mexican house at the top of the cartel, is the mausoleum of a working cemetery in the West End of Atlanta. The state's tourism office is the only source for it and gives it one line. The cemetery's own website says nothing about the series; the copyright notice at the foot of it reads 2014, three years before the series began.
The other Mexico is a shopping centre. In the third season Plaza Fiesta in Chamblee stands in for the country itself, and it is open, free to walk into and eighteen kilometres from the mausoleum. Between them, a cemetery and a mall do the work of a foreign country.
Chicago, Kansas City and a campus in Brookhaven
The meadow at Piedmont Park, standing in for Chicago's Great Lawn in the fourth season.
Chicago's Great Lawn in the fourth season is the open meadow at Piedmont Park. The state's list also credits the same grass in Avengers: Infinity War, Anchorman 2 and What to Expect When You're Expecting.
Season four's Kansas City dive bar is a dive bar on Howell Mill Road. Northside Tavern was a grocery in the 1940s and has live music in it most nights of the week. The show needed a dive bar and rented a dive bar. The only fiction is the city.
Oglethorpe University is the loosest entry of the three. The state's list names the stone buildings and stops there: no scene, no episode, no season beyond the fourth. Lupton Hall is the one in the photograph, and the campus museum is free to enter.
Midtown, West Midtown, Buckhead and Peachtree Corners
By the third season the Byrdes are eating in rooms that cost money, and the production went out and rented four of them.
Ecco plays Arrowhead Tavern in season three. Which Ecco, nobody says: the restaurant has three addresses in the city, one of them at the airport, and the source does not distinguish between them, so the pin here is on the Midtown room and that is a guess. Bacchanalia, open since 1993, plays a restaurant called Oak & Sage in season four. Chops Lobster Bar in Buckhead plays an upmarket cigar club in the same season, and the state's list points at the tiled ceiling as the thing a viewer will recognise; writing in early 2022 it adds that the place was then closed for repairs, and whether it has reopened since, we did not check.
The fourth is the odd one. J.R.'s Log House in Peachtree Corners is a log building that has been serving barbecue since 1983, and in season three it plays a barbecue place called JR's BBQ. The production rented a restaurant, changed one letter in the name and pointed the camera.
2000 Moreland Avenue SE, Atlanta, and Norcross, Gwinnett County
Ruth drives to a drive-in with a bag of cash and does not notice that she is being followed. This is the best-attested point on the page: the state puts the scene in season three, and Netflix names the same theatre for the same scene. Four screens, still running, with a flea market on the lot at weekends.
Netflix's own travel guide then does something odd with it. Having explained that the scene was shot in Atlanta, it turns to readers who are actually standing at the Lake of the Ozarks and sends them to the 19 Drive-In at Cuba, Missouri, which is not in the show. It is simply a drive-in near the right lake. The official guide to the series, in other words, ends up recommending a substitute for a substitute.
The other outdoor errand of those seasons is at Best Friend Park in Norcross, sixteen hectares of municipal grass, where Wendy's fight at the farmers market was filmed in the third season and the production came back for the fourth.
Missouri, 860 kilometres west
The lake, the town and the dock
The Community Bridge over the real Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. No source we read puts this bridge in the series.
Photo: Federal Highway Administration · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Camden, Miller and Morgan Counties, Missouri. The setting, not the location.
This is the lake the series is named after, set on, and almost never filmed on. Netflix's own guide says some shots of the real lake are used and stops there. We could not get further. The lists that name a particular bridge or a particular water tower all trace back to other location websites, and we do not build on those, so this page names no object on the real lake that you can see on screen.
Osage Beach is the town the Byrdes move to. Its own city government puts it at nearly 5,000 full-time residents for most of the year, and tens of thousands of visitors on a holiday weekend. A small town in the winter, and not one in July.
Ten kilometres up the lake from the dam is Alhonna Resort & Marina, which is the Blue Cat's model. Netflix says the lodge is based on this resort, and passes on a magazine's reporting that Bill Dubuque, who created the series, once worked the dock here as a student. Nothing was filmed at it. The man who worked this dock wrote a show set on this water, the lodge in it was built 860 kilometres away in Georgia, and the copy is the one that is still open.
Ozark Law is a different show
If you came here looking for that one: Ozark Law was filmed on the real Lake of the Ozarks, in Osage Beach and Lake Ozark, Missouri. It is a ten-part documentary series made by Lucky 8 for A&E, it went out from 8 January 2025, and it follows the two towns' police departments. The city of Osage Beach announced it in December 2024 and says a documentary crew rode along with lake-area officers through the previous summer.
So the show with Ozark in its title that actually filmed at the Lake of the Ozarks is the one about the police.
The Bagnell Dam Strip
The Bagnell Dam Strip at dusk in May 1973, shot for a federal photographic survey. A crew worked this street forty-three years later.
Except once. On Wednesday 31 August 2016 the lake was talking about film crews being in town for a Netflix series produced by Jason Bateman, and the local paper went down to look. It found a crew working outside Richard's Relic Shack on the Bagnell Dam Strip, with half of Bagnell Dam Boulevard blocked off and police directing the traffic round it.
The Strip is the mile of shops and arcades that runs down to the dam. A federal photographer shot it at dusk in May 1973, cars and lights the whole length of it, and filed the picture as a commercial funland. Forty-three years later a crew stood in the same stretch for a day and went home to Georgia.
That Wednesday is the earliest day of this production anybody wrote a date on. No source records the crew on that water again, and none of them will say which episode the day became, or whether it became one.
Four years along one road in Hall County. Four seasons and forty-four episodes out of two Georgia reservoirs. One Wednesday on the lake the show is named after.
