DTF St. Louis

I can’t say I’ve seen too many shows like DTF St. Louis. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of prestige HBO series over the years, but none quite like this. Something incredibly odd and bordering on surreal, but also incredibly human and interested in a deep and abiding friendship where pretty much all of our expectations are both somehow undermined and affirmed. A crime drama that turns out to be not really a crime drama. A show where basically everyone is just trying to figure stuff out along with its audience. There are elements here and there of a White Lotus, but that’s really the only parallel I can think of where the up-front mystery takes a back seat to the secrets and relationships between the characters. But that’s really just a surface comparison, as this series goes way deeper into a truly original and different relationship between two of our main characters, Clark (Jason Bateman) and Floyd (David Harbour).

And, look, this series is pretty devastating. It is not for the faint of heart. It ends and you just want to burrow into something. Which, I suppose, is the sign of an effecting and critical success. However, depending on your tolerance for heartbreak, I suppose you could skip this one. But you’d be missing out on one of the more memorable narrative explorations I’ve seen in quite a while. And maybe it’s because I’m a man of a certain age that I feel something special here. Though Ms. Hipster felt it, too. Something in the existential nature of Clark and Floyd’s bonding that I don’t believe has ever been explored on screen before. A man in Clark who, by all accounts, is an empty vessel. A shell of a man — and portrayed that way by a very soft-talking, flatly-affected Bateman — who meets an incredibly sensitive and reflective man in Floyd. A man who seemingly randomly becomes an ASL interpreter because his heart basically tells him he should. Both have insecurities and secrets that they hold inside, but find an oath to their truths through each other. Leading to an emotional and physical comfort with one another that is… well, it’s not something you’d normally see on screen. Do these two talk like normal human men? They do not. They talk like a screenwriter’s version of that. But, once you get used to the cadence of the writing and delivery, it’s pretty great. Bateman’s range has never been great, but here he is really still and flatlined throughout, but plays off Harbour’s sizzling physicality and wide open sweetness in a really terrific way. The duo shouldn’t work at all, but they mesh in scene after scene.

The fulcrum in their relationship is Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini). I’m probably not using fulcrum right, but she’s the third leg of the love triangle. While her marriage to Floyd wanes — which may or may not have started with a mysterious penis injury that the show teases out over the course of the season — her relationship with Clark takes on new dimensions. Oh, did I mention that the show does the whole starting with a dead body thing? Yes, sorry, we know Floyd dies. And the series goes back in time — jumping around quite a bit — setting up this mystery of what happened to Floyd. Was it his new best friend, Clark, who is having an affair with his wife? Is it his wife, who is having an affair, with his best friend? Is it the teenage stepson, with whom he has a very close, parental relationship, but who has a history of violent emotional disturbances? Or is it some random hookup he’s met through the titular DTF St. Louis dating app? Because that’s what DTF St. Louis is, a dating app. On the case is local detective, Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) and veteran state guy, Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins). A duo who are also wonderful and sneakily show us a parallel story about opening up to new experiences and a budding and unlikely friendship. And thank god for them, as they provide some levity to an otherwise slow-burn tragic story. But Carol’s character, unlike the two men we see talk about their fears and failures, is almost unknowable. She says at one point that she will do anything to provide for her son, and it is this singular goal that turns out to be her motivation and the factor for all of her actions throughout the series. Including taking a gig as a little league umpire despite knowing nothing about baseball. But, damn, if she isn’t incredibly quirky and original in her portrayal. She is incredibly focused and practical in everything she does. While managing a prickly and clumsily manipulative personality that is constantly throwing our detective team off their game. It is only at the very end that we learn way more about what’s underneath it all. Another great mystery solved, but one that has nothing to do with murder or a dead body. Just excellent writing. And a performance by Cardellini that is so odd and intermittently Bateman-man like in its mirroring that, as a viewer, you’re never quite sure what the heck is going on with her. In a good way.

This is a tough show to quantify, honestly. The acting is great. The writing is top-notch. They even bring in Peter Sarsgaard to play a recurring support role and he is just wonderful. A really nuanced character who, again, subverts our expectations about what DTF is all about. And what feeling safe and good in a relationship can mean. Chris Perfetti from Abbott Elementary makes an appearance as well, the creators metering his personality in a really calculated way. There is just very little wasted space here. All the actors are deployed in a refreshing way and the dialogue, while a little stilted and quirky, is exacting and considered without seeming overwrought or manipulative. That’s a hard tightrope to walk when taking on the pitfalls of mid-life crisis and existential deletion. And the aforementioned discovery that male friendship can know no boundaries despite societal goalposts. I think at some level the show’s creator, Steven Conrad, knows that our brains have been broken by modern TV. That the dead body thing is the way shows start off now. And that, through investigation and weakness of character, we will eventually figure out who put that body there. There are the suspects, the innocents and the cops who get to the bottom of it. Yet we, as the audience, know exactly what happened, but after meeting and going through it with the characters don’t want it to be true. Because it’s always the most elevated and innocent souls who end up too good for this place.