Buddy!

SPOILERS for Ozark and Scarface

Harris Yulin has been around a long time.

You can find him as far back as the movie "Doc," in the 70's, when he played Doc Holliday opposite Stacy Keach's Wyatt Earp, in a dark "revisionist" version of the famous buddy tale. Faye Dunaway was in it, too, took Yulin as a lover, and had nothing but good things to say about him in the years after.

Come 1983, Yulin had two extremely memorable scenes in "Scarface" as Bernstein, the crooked Miami cop who shakes down Pacino and lives to regret it:

Yulin: (Shot in the gut by Pacino) You can't shoot a COP!
Pacino: Who ever said chu wuz one?

Yulin defiantly goes out yelling F you at Pacino. He dies tough, defiant.

Around 2001, you can find Yulin as a dirty cop in a group of them(or is he a dirty lawyer? I can't remember) alongside crooked Denzel in "Training Day." Yulin details how to use peanut butter in a new, interesting way to beat a rap in the courtroom.

A long career. Since 1970, at least.

And there he was in 2018 as Buddy in Ozark. I , for one, was happy to see him -- an experienced old actor with decades of work behind him. An interesting face. Great, penetrating eyes. A great voice.

And a good character to play.

Buddy's pretty much about the most decent and principled character in Ozark -- which is funny, since he seems to have done a lot of dirty deeds in his younger days(as "Jimmy Smalls"), albeit always as a respected "power broker" for union labor.

And how sad was it(for a Harris Yulin fan) to have Buddy introduced as a man who doesn't have much time to live. Bad ticker. Could be any day now.

I crossed my fingers for Buddy to live a long, long time -- episodic long-form TV(like daytime soap operas) can keep a dying character alive for years.

But it was not to be. All of Season One(and crucially helping the Byrde family by killing a guy they could not), about 2/3 of Season Two. A good character. A good man(far better than Bernstein or that guy in Training Day.)

Bye bye, Buddy.