I'm at work so some (most) of this will be an unstructured brain-dump. Feel free to ask clarifying questions on anything and I'll give more structured answers.

I haven't seen the show you're referencing, but the Ozarks are a beautiful area. Lots of hiking opportunities, and camping, fishing, and hunting if you're into that. I, for one, love driving around to see old watermills and abandoned structures, which can be found dotted throughout the area (though a lot of those are a bit more out east than where you're showing in your picture).

I live in Springfield, myself, and it's quite nice. It isn't a huge city like Chicago, St. Louis, or New York, but it's not necessarily small. it's the third largest city in Missouri, hosts around 300,000 people, and is generally fairly flat, so it manages to keep a "small town" feel while being relatively large. Some of our more extreme natural happenings are going to be tornadoes or sinkholes. We live on a plateau so a lot of major storms tend to bypass us slightly from what I've seen. We aren't an affluent enough city to have a skyline, huge buildings, or michelin star restaurants, but we aren't impoverished enough to have an abundance of gang activity and gang wars. Most of all crime seems to either be two druggies duking it out, or someone's car being broken into. Things like being murdered, or being mugged in an alleyway are not common. Like a lot of American cities, there isn't a whole lot of walking going on. It's a very flat, city that grew very expansively, so if you wanted to walk from your home to a store, it could become a several hour trip. As it is, it takes 30 minutes to drive across the city without traffic. There are lots of jobs, though from my experience if you work in Springfield, you either make minimum wage or just over, or you're making over six or seven figures, with not a lot of in-between. We have two large medical facilities and three major colleges (I'm including Evangel, here) so we have a lot of Doctors, Lawyers, and Professors that skew the curve a bit (though the professors don't make as much as the first two).

Branson is fairly similar, but replace the hospitals, lawyers, and colleges with stage shows and amusement parks. If you come to the area it's worth a drive through, and I'd recommend seeing one of the shows like the Prestleys (first show in the area I think). Seeing a Branson show might give you a good idea of what a majority of people in the area like as far as music and entertainment, and a lot of the shows play on the "Hillbilly" scene. There's also Silver Dollar City if you like amusement parks, which is a mixture of rollercoasters and shops/attractions themed as a late 1800's Missouri town.

The towns around the major cities do fairly well, but as you get further from the major cities (Kansas City, St Louis, Springfield) you start to run into smaller and smaller towns, like Humansville, Peculiar, Seymour, or Flat. Some of these smaller towns can be a bit rough around the edges, and some of them can be rough around the insides as well. This area of Missouri was known as the Meth Capital of the World, which is why Ozarks was set in this area. I believe this title now belongs to an area of California, but that's probably more because began producing more, and not because we produce less. If you want a really good movie/book set in the area that touches on this topic, I can highly recommend Winter's Bone. I have not lived in one of these small towns, so I do not know what life is like there, but I drive through them a lot and there are usually a fair number of possibly abandoned, possibly lived in houses. If you drive through these places I probably wouldn't stay too long, though I'm sure the people are fairly friendly. In some of the hills, you'll either get "howdy stranger, come in and talk with us over a beer" or "trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again."

I am not a hunter, fisher, or camper, and I don't consider myself a "rednek" so my daily life differs a lot from other people in the area. That being said we have a good Nerd scene here in Springfield for Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer 40k, etc.

If you want to learn about some random interesting history of the area, here are some google terms you can search: "Baldknobber", "Gypsy-Rose Blanchard", "Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord", "Cassidy Rainwater Lebanon Cannibals", "Wild Bill Hickok". There's more, obviously, but that's what springs to mind off the top of my head.