It’s each an ineffective sales pitch and customarily 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 within the entanglements between Clark (Jason Bateman), his latest 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, an area 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 company office), Outback Steakhouse (where Clark and Floyd go on their first friend date) and Jamba Juice (where Clark gets his day by day Go-Getter smoothie for a day pick-me-up) are invoked to set the tone. St. Louis itself — though our heroes actually live within the fictional suburb of Twyla — is seemingly chosen 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 tasteless normality of suburban life right into a staging ground for absurdist humor with its own distinct cadence. In truth, an early entry in my notes reads “Tim Robinson but quiet” — there’s a Robinsonian rhythm to easy, quirkily phrased lines of dialogue like “You wish my dreams, on the Quality Garden Suites?” But Conrad’s characters aren’t loud, blustering oafs designed to explore masculine bravado, even when that’s a part of what’s occurring here; when Clark and Floyd, an on-air ASL interpreter, meet while covering a cyclone, the following bromance has shades of “Step Brothers.” The central trio are mild-mannered people in economic and spiritual malaise of the type 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 form 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” seems like a potentially similar bait-and-switch for Conrad, even when Missouri can have less immediate allure than the Maui beaches of “The White Lotus” Season 1. Who killed Floyd and why is an easy, easy-to-understand framework for the story, driven in the current 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 within 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 the very 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+? In case you haven’t, someone in your life might be blissful to wax rhapsodic.
“DTF St. Louis,” it needs to be said, is the name of an app catering to married but nonmonogamy-curious users within the titular urban area. Clark, whose early bird schedule has interfered together with his sex life, initially pitches Floyd on joint exploration. Once Clark takes up with Carol, nonetheless, 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.
One other indication is how frankly, if dispassionately, everyone talks about sex. “Porn is a component of my marital sex life,” Jodie flatly informs Donoghue, her coworker. In recounting one among his app encounters, Floyd clinically says he “withdrew my ass” to politely signal an absence of interest. Though the deadpan delivery is clearly comedic, “DTF St. Louis” takes its subjects’ desires seriously; the roleplay Clark and Carol undertake of their rendezvous is simply too psychologically specific to be simply a gag. The result’s a formidable balancing act: to joke around and about sex without making sex the punchline.
To tug it off, Conrad has the help of an exemplary forged. Last 12 months, I criticized the Netflix series “Black Rabbit”, during which Bateman played a good-for-nothing troublemaker, for failing to comprehend the actor works best with bad guys who hide their flaws beneath a pleasing 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 style 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, during 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 kilos and 1000’s in unpaid tax debt, Floyd is a bashful, self-conscious guy who nonetheless can’t help telling Clark about his penis deformity of their first-ever conversation. Harbour gives him each a childlike naivete and flashes of confidence, the qualities combining to assist him connect with Carol’s socially maladjusted son Richard (Arlan Ruf). Clark could also 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 because the goal of Lily Allen’s scathing breakup album “West End Girl,” about…sexual infidelity in a contemporary marriage. Does which have any real bearing on his work here? No! Is the parallel still too glaring to disregard? Yes!)
Cardellini’s Carol is, by design, probably the most opaque of the three. (Bateman and Harbour also executive produce, whereas Cardellini doesn’t.) After the primary couple episodes are framed from the boys’s viewpoint, her perspective is the last to reach. 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 best way Carol slices a carrot puts Kendall Jenner’s cucumber knifework to shame. Cardellini is equally plausible as a femme fatale and a lady who likely has an energetic 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, nevertheless it is idiosyncratic enough that I expect some will find the show a troublesome sell; it actually took me just a few episodes to acclimate to Conrad’s stilted, precisely crafted world. That the performances are all so calibrated to one another’s wavelengths, if not a bewildered viewer’s, is a sign that “DTF St. Louis” is achieving its own goals, nonetheless inscrutable they’re to an outsider. Once I reached the tip of the 4 episodes provided to critics, I was down for more — if not in the best 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.