This article contains spoilers for the first four episodes of DTF St. Louis… but not many of them, okay? Okay. The series debuts on HBO on March 1.
For decades now, HBO has carved out a niche as the TV destination for Sunday nights at 9 PM. Sometimes that takes the form of big fantasy shows like House of the Dragon or IP extensions like The Penguin and IT: Welcome to Derry; it can also mean a prestige series like The Gilded Age or Succession. But the most frequent mode for the time slot? HBO’s Sunday Night Mysteries, which aren’t branded as such but might as well be: True Detective, The White Lotus, Big Little Lies, even Mare of Easttown or Task. They all may have different tones and points of view, but the hook for viewers to come back each week is a serialized, ongoing mystery…usually of the murder variety.
That’s true of DTF St. Louis, a new series written and directed by Steven Conrad, and starring David Harbour, Jason Bateman, and Linda Cardellini in – per the official synopsis – “a limited series about a love triangle between three adults experiencing middle-age malaise, that leads to one of them ending up dead.” So yes, you’ve got a central mystery that’s already been spoiled in the trailers for the series: Who killed David Harbour’s Floyd? Over the course of the season (four episodes were provided to critics for review), the show flashes back in time to illuminate more and more of what went down with that central trio, twisting and turning as you discover that what you think is going on may, in fact, not be what really happened.
All of that is par for the course for any mystery, but DTF St. Louis is also extremely, purposefully weird; in fact, the closest analogue to DTF St. Louis isn’t any of the HBO shows mentioned above, but one on FX: Fargo. This may be a bit of a surface comparison, but right off the bat, the characters in DTF seem like they could have hopped right out of Noah Hawley’s anthology, even though the two cities – that would be Fargo and St. Louis – are 794 miles away from each other. You’ve got staccato speech and specific accents, and while perhaps not as wild as on Fargo, the characters have names like Clark Forrest (Bateman) and Floyd Smernitch (Harbour). Long stretches of time are spent on seeming digressions like discussing drinks at Jamba Juice, and one affair features sex moves that are so insane they seem uncomfortable at best and downright dangerous at worst.
Also on the Fargo comparison beat, you have two laconic investigators looking into the crime: Joy Sunday as Jodie Plumb, a local special investigator somewhat in the mode of Marge Gunderson; and Richard Jenkins as big city detective Donoghue Homer, who consistently thinks he has it all figured out and consistently does not. It’s a classic pairing of a young, ambitious investigator and an old, seen-it-all-done-it-all detective. The show also doesn’t ignore that one is an old white man and the other is a young Black woman.
But what becomes apparent as the series continues past the broadly painted premiere is that there’s a kindness and warmth below the surface. Each time Homer loudly professes he’s closed the case, Plumb presents a piece of evidence that contradicts that; he sighs, hears her out, and they investigate further. That sort of kindness is key to the development of the series, especially since the premiere is off-putting, and it takes a while to get on board with the tone of the show. It seems like Conrad is making fun of the setting and the characters; it has the feel of a city boy pointing out how hilarious these country bumpkins can be.
That’s particularly true when it comes to Floyd, who is overweight, not particularly smart (one scene shows him professing how scared he was that Batman was going to die in a random Batman comic, but then he doesn’t, and Floyd is very relieved), and suffers from Peyronie’s disease – essentially a broken penis – which he explains is why he needed to learn ASL (American Sign Language). But as the show continues, it’s clear that his weight problems and intelligence hide a bright ray of sunshine; it’s no coincidence that the opening song for the series is “Let the Sunshine In” from Hair, or that Clark is a weatherman. St. Louis is consistently filmed as overcast and gray, and the theme song asks “where’s the sunshine” – that’s all coming from Floyd.
Similarly, the central premise seems to revolve around the titular app – DTF St. Louis, a hook-up app for married adults which Clark discovers and which he and Floyd sign up for before Floyd winds up dead. The idea of an app specifically for adultery in the St. Louis area is also a little silly, but like the death of Floyd, it’s merely an excuse to keep viewers turning back to a show that is neither violent nor particularly sexy. Yes, there are languid shots of Cardellini at points, but they have a dream-like quality versus an exploitative one. And even as we discover how this main trio may have manipulated each other, there’s real, earnest emotion for each of the characters. There are no villains here, just lonely people who aren’t getting what they want from life and need something more.
DTF St. Louis is also a curious intersection of three careers that have changed dramatically over time. Harbour is the most noticeable, as this is his first project post-Stranger Things. While Floyd is much dumber than Sheriff Hopper, the aggressively generous sign-language interpreter flourishes most when bonding with his emotionally troubled stepson, Richard (Arlan Ruf). Seeing Harbour reach out to a strange, lonely kid isn’t too much of a stretch from where we found him in Hawkins, but putting it all in an adult context does feel like it’s challenging our expectations while leaning into his comedy chops.
On the other hand, there’s Jason Bateman, who got his start in comedy and has more recently delved into dark (sometimes quite literally) dramas like Ozark and Netflix’s recent Black Bunny. He finds a happy medium with DTF St. Louis, which gets funnier the more time Bateman and Harbour spend together, but the show still allows Bateman to flex the less comedic muscles he’s developed over time.
Cardellini is the most fascinating career arc of the three, having fully embraced her femme fatale era over the past few years on shows like Dead to Me, No Good Deed, and the upcoming Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake, in which she’ll be playing Jason’s mom, Pamela Voorhees. In DTF St. Louis, it initially seems like she’s playing the hits: She’s a blonde bombshell, boobs out, manipulating two dumb dudes. But a powerhouse performance towards the beginning of the show’s fourth episode eviscerates all that, looping back to Conrad’s main thrust that all of these people are to blame, yet none of them are outright bad.
There are other characters who flit in and out of the action, though none of them get a ton of time or a lot to do. The lone exception is Peter Sarsgaard, who does his best with a relatively broad portrayal of a gay man who runs a roller rink and may know more about Floyd’s murder than he’s letting on. Sarsgaard, too, is treated with more kindness than his initial introduction would imply, but at least based on four episodes (there are three more in the season), he’s mostly there to provide exposition and a pretty hilarious observation about Mail Boxes Etc.
It’ll be fascinating to see if the mostly impervious Sunday 9 PM slot works for an odd duck like DTF St. Louis. It’s filled with great performances, name actors, and at least one buzzy sequence per episode, ranging from some hilarious Indiana Jones porn and a wild gym routine to a sequence in Episode 4 that HBO has explicitly asked us not to spoil. That’s probably enough to get the hype machine churning, but this series doesn’t have the high-end real estate and rich people being vapid of The White Lotus or the gritty realism of shows like Mare of Easttown and Task. It’s weird, and adding to the weirdness is that it was initially a show based on a New Yorker article about a murderous dentist that starred Harbour and Pedro Pascal and is now not that at all. In fact, DTF is closer to the half-hour comedies the channel usually puts at 10 PM, rather than the prime hour-long 9 PM slot – see The Chair Company for the closest, most recent point of comparison.
It’s a test, really, and the sort of test at which HBO usually excels. Here, it takes a few episodes for DTF St. Louis to hit its stride, but when it gets down to it, it is down to…well, you know.
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