It is both an ineffective sales pitch and generally accurate to call “DTF St. Louis” the unsexiest erotic thriller ever made. The HBO limited series, all seven episodes of which were written and directed by “Patriot” creator Steven Conrad, combines sex, murder and betrayal in the entanglements between Clark (Jason Bateman), his new friend Floyd (David Harbour) and Floyd’s wife Carol (Linda Cardellini). But “DTF St. Louis” sets this story against an exquisitely banal backdrop to uncanny, off-kilter and ultimately hilarious effect.
The series’ first image is of Clark, a local weatherman, commuting to work on his recumbent bike, as dorky a mode of transportation as has ever been invented. Brands like Purina (where Carol works in the corporate office), Outback Steakhouse (where Clark and Floyd go on their first friend date) and Jamba Juice (where Clark gets his daily Go-Getter smoothie for an afternoon pick-me-up) are invoked to set the tone. St. Louis itself — though our heroes actually live in the fictional suburb of Twyla — is seemingly selected for its total lack of glamor or noirish allure.
“DTF St. Louis” is the second HBO series in six months, after Tim Robinson’s “The Chair Company,” to heighten the bland normality of suburban life into a staging ground for absurdist humor with its own distinct cadence. In fact, an early entry in my notes reads “Tim Robinson but quiet” — there’s a Robinsonian rhythm to simple, quirkily phrased lines of dialogue like “You want my dreams, at the Quality Garden Suites?” But Conrad’s characters aren’t loud, blustering oafs designed to explore masculine bravado, even if that’s part of what’s going on here; when Clark and Floyd, an on-air ASL interpreter, meet while covering a cyclone, the ensuing bromance has shades of “Step Brothers.” The central trio are mild-mannered people in economic and spiritual malaise of the sort that drives Clark and Carol to strike up an affair, and leads Floyd to wind up dead by a poisoned (and canned) Bloody Mary.
“The White Lotus” creator Mike White has described the dead body that opens each season as a kind of Trojan horse, successfully leveraging a murder mystery to a mass audience for the adult relationship dramedies that were already White’s stock in trade. “DTF St. Louis” feels like a potentially similar bait-and-switch for Conrad, even if Missouri may have less immediate allure than the Maui beaches of “The White Lotus” Season 1. Who killed Floyd and why is a simple, easy-to-understand framework for the story, driven in the present tense by investigating detectives Donoghue (Richard Jenkins, a masterful straight man) and Jodie (Joy Sunday). (Much of the show takes place in nonlinear flashbacks that fill in the gaps of Clark, Carol and Floyd’s dangerous liaisons.) While I can’t predict its popular success, the genre and HBO-Sunday-night perch of “DTF St. Louis” seem destined for at least a broader reach than Conrad’s prior CV of shows with a small but fiercely loyal audience. Ever heard of the stop-motion noir musical “Ultra City Smiths,” which aired for a single season on AMC+? If you haven’t, someone in your life is probably happy to wax rhapsodic.
“DTF St. Louis,” it should be said, is the name of an app catering to married but nonmonogamy-curious users in the titular urban area. Clark, whose early bird schedule has interfered with his sex life, initially pitches Floyd on joint exploration. Once Clark takes up with Carol, however, it’s Floyd who dives in, recounting his exploits in breathless detail for Clark’s vicarious enjoyment. Like Floyd’s job, which involves tasks as disparate as communicating the severity of a weather event to dancing along at a pop concert, or the St. Louis Sheriff’s Department severe Brutalist headquarters, the hyper-local app’s existence is a clue the show takes place in a universe that’s not exactly our own.
Another indication is how frankly, if dispassionately, everyone talks about sex. “Porn is a part of my marital sex life,” Jodie flatly informs Donoghue, her coworker. In recounting one of his app encounters, Floyd clinically says he “withdrew my ass” to politely signal a lack of interest. Though the deadpan delivery is clearly comedic, “DTF St. Louis” takes its subjects’ desires seriously; the roleplay Clark and Carol undertake in their rendezvous is too psychologically specific to be simply a gag. The result is an impressive balancing act: to joke around and about sex without making sex the punchline.
To pull it off, Conrad has the assistance of an exemplary cast. Last year, I criticized the Netflix series “Black Rabbit”, in which Bateman played a good-for-nothing troublemaker, for failing to realize the actor works best with bad guys who hide their flaws beneath a pleasant facade. Here, thankfully, he’s right back in his sweet spot. We don’t know whether Clark actually hurt Floyd, but at minimum, he’s the type of guy who lies to his wife about conducting a “Safety Sesh” on a swing set so he can ogle his neighbor. But as our perceptions of Clark shift with various revelations, Bateman masterfully modifies his bearing from blandly sinister to sweetly sincere and back again. The credits sequence alone, in which Bateman karate chops in slow motion to The Fifth Dimension, is an Emmy reel in miniature.
Harbour, for his part, seems to relish the reprieve from limiting, if lucrative, family genre fare like “Stranger Things” and the MCU. Saddled with 30 extra pounds and thousands in unpaid tax debt, Floyd is a bashful, self-conscious guy who nonetheless can’t help telling Clark about his penis deformity in their first-ever conversation. Harbour gives him both a childlike naivete and flashes of confidence, the qualities combining to help him connect with Carol’s socially maladjusted son Richard (Arlan Ruf). Clark may be cuckolding his much less financially secure friend, yet we still understand that Floyd, too, has something to contribute to their relationship. (Here is the space where I acknowledge that Harbour recently made headlines as the target of Lily Allen’s scathing breakup album “West End Girl,” about…sexual infidelity in a modern marriage. Does that have any real bearing on his work here? No! Is the parallel still too glaring to ignore? Yes!)
Cardellini’s Carol is, by design, the most opaque of the three. (Bateman and Harbour also executive produce, whereas Cardellini does not.) After the first couple episodes are framed from the men’s point of view, her perspective is the last to arrive. Until then, we get a former Don Draper mistress reentering seductress mode, with a “DTF St. Louis” twist: Carol and Floyd’s sex life has fizzled because she’s taken on a side hustle as a Little League umpire and he finds her getup, which we’re treated to at every possible ungainly angle, unattractive; the way Carol slices a carrot puts Kendall Jenner’s cucumber knifework to shame. Cardellini is equally plausible as a femme fatale and a woman who likely has an active Nextdoor profile.
As performers, Cardellini, Harbour and Bateman have the chemistry that their awkward, alienated characters sometimes don’t. “DTF St. Louis” isn’t exactly cringe comedy, but it is idiosyncratic enough that I expect some will find the show a tough sell; it certainly took me a few episodes to acclimate to Conrad’s stilted, precisely crafted world. That the performances are all so calibrated to each other’s wavelengths, if not a bewildered viewer’s, is an indication that “DTF St. Louis” is achieving its own goals, however inscrutable they are to an outsider. When I reached the end of the four episodes provided to critics, I was down for more — if not in the way the show’s title suggests.
“DTF St. Louis” will premiere on HBO and HBO Max on March 1 at 9 p.m. ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
Source: variety.com
