Jason Bateman, left, and David Harbour in DTF St. Louis.Tina Rowden/Supplied
Something happens to me when I watch the limited series DTF St. Louis, which is nearing the end of its seven-episode run on HBO/Crave: I make a noise. A character says or does something vulnerable, and I kind of…erupt. It’s almost a hoot of laughter, but it has agony in it. It’s half, “Ack, TMI,” and half, “Oh, the humanity.” It’s not the provoked discomfort I feel watching, say, Nathan Fielder. It’s more of an anxious tenderness.
Created by Steve Conrad, who also wrote and directed every episode, DTF St. Louis masquerades as a suburban sex murder mystery: Clark (Jason Bateman), a local news weatherman “in the St. Louis area,” befriends Floyd (David Harbour), an ASL interpreter, then starts to sleep with Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini). Clark also introduces Floyd to the titular app, where people hook up to get it on. (DTF stands for Down To, well, Fornicate.) Someone ends up dead, and a wonderfully mismatched pair of detectives – Plumb (Joy Sunday) and Homer (Richard Jenkins) – investigate. (Jenkins is full of sad sighs and subtle eyebrow raises, every one of which deserves to be a meme.)
But the sex stuff is just cover for something much more heartfelt and heart-rending: the saving grace of male friendship, amid the bruised disappointment of ordinary life. All three main characters are achingly lonely, living lives of quiet desperation – 2020s American style. Clark and Floyd love their spouses but can’t seem to connect with them any more, especially sexually, and they’re bewildered by how that happened. (One of their penises is literally damaged, and the fact that’s not a clunky metaphor is a testament to the smart writing.)
Carol has an adolescent son from a previous relationship, Richard (Arlan Ruf), who has borderline personality disorder; both she and Floyd can be only as happy as he is. They are in debt and don’t see a way out, and even their smallest dreams feel impossible. (Getting “grown-up furniture and bedding” for Richard’s room has been on Carol’s wish list for over two years, so how could they ever afford a specialized school?)
Clark and Floyd are the kind of men who braid their daughter’s hair and have weekly heart-to-hearts with their stepson; though they sign up for paintball, neither wants to shoot anyone. They’re much happier pedalling side by side on recumbent bikes on a wine tasting tour, or asking each other questions such as, “What do you worry about at night?”
That they’ve found each other is a small miracle, and Conrad treats it as such, with proper reverence. But Conrad also wraps the friendship in so much droll humour, so much naked human ridiculousness, that you smile and squirm away in equal measure. (Watch for the scene in episode four where Clark and Floyd perform the whitest rap in human history, about acing a life insurance physical.)
Harbour in DTF St. Louis.Tina Rowden/Supplied
I can’t say enough about how layered the writing is, how unusual the tone. A fractured timeline has become a prestige-TV trope, but Conrad makes it essential to the narrative. He shows us a handful of scenes several times. The first time around, we see them as Jenkins’s detective does, skeptically; we’re sure we know what’s going on. The next time we see them, we have a bit more information; things aren’t as simple as they once seemed. By episode six, with everything clicking into place, we see them anew, and we’re ashamed of ourselves for how judgmental we’ve been.
Even the opening credit sequence, which initially just seems odd, comes into focus by the end, in a way that will make you gasp. I guarantee you’ll never hear Let the Sunshine In quite the same way again, and all the musical choices are equally clever and original.
DTF St. Louis arrives at a tricky time for maleness. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s pseudo-machismo is breaking the world. The internet is rife with Looksmaxxing and Trad Husband nonsense. Our TV screens are dominated on the one hand by Taylor Sheridan, whose series (Landman, The Madison, Yellowstone) define manliness along strict, throwback gender roles; and on the other hand by Bill Lawrence, whose series (Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Rooster) are aspirational about kindness to the point that they feel more like fables than real life.
Arlan Ruf and Linda Cardellini in DTF St. Louis.Tina Rowden/Supplied
Clark and Floyd, on the other hand, feel like people you might know. They’re both trying hard to be “good men” in a culture that defines manliness quite differently than they do. Their relief at finding someone they can trust, someone who makes them feel less isolated – less weird – is palpable. (Listen to how often they address one another as “man,” as in “Hey man, how you doing, man?”)
At one point, Floyd delivers a monologue – about how, as a boy, he pictured himself as a man “parachuting out of an airplane with a machine gun in a time of war, and all his war buddies floating by him going, ‘You’re a good leader’” – that’s nearly unbearable in its poignancy.
I have a visceral reaction to certain series – Lodge 49 was one, back in 2018; so was Station Eleven (2021), and most recently, Dying for Sex. I can feel the singular voice and the intelligence of the people who created them, and I feel it personally, down to my core. I wish I could phone them after every episode and pepper them with questions about how they did it.
So specifically do they speak to me that I need to look wildly around the room to make sure other viewers are seeing what I’m seeing, that I’m not hallucinating what just happened. But so generally do they also speak to their current moment that I can’t believe that people aren’t standing on street corners night and day, talking about them nonstop with strangers. DTF St. Louis makes me feel like that.