DTF St Louis TV show: David Harbour and Jason Bateman in suburban murder mystery
Jason Bateman, David Harbour and Linda Cardellini are three points of a love triangle in suburban mystery where one of them ends up dead.
When David Harbour accepted the role of Floyd in new HBO series DTF St Louis, he probably couldn’t have predicted his personal life would’ve blown up between production and release.
There are some uncomfortable parallels between his real life and his character, namely that his onscreen avatar, Floyd, joins a hook-up dating app, DTF St Louis, to explore an extra-marital affair, and Harbour, of course, was accused by his ex-wife Lily Allen in song of many improprieties during their relationship.
That’s where the similarities end, because Floyd is portrayed as a mostly wholesome and decent guy despite his flirtations with infidelities. Which is not to suggest that Harbour is not, and he has not publicly addressed the tales in Allen’s break-up/revenge album.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.So maybe the timing for DTF St Louis, which also stars Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini, is awkward, but in another way, it’s not. Because Harbour is really good in it, and he embodies this sweet vibe that’s really different from the character portrayed in Allen’s songs – that speaks to his talents as an actor in that you can actually forget all this other stuff that’s happening outside of this performance and series.
Created by Steven Conrad (Patriot), the show is a genre mash-up of darkly comedic, crime and drama, a tone that’s strange and yet familiar. It takes a little patience to settle in with it, but then it’s easy to get wrapped up in its oddball story.
Which is also a warning. Pay attention, because there are quite a lot of flashbacks to different timelines and if you’re also scrolling through a food delivery app trying to sort out dinner, you’re going to get lost.
The core of DTF St Louis are these three characters. Floyd, who’s a sign language interpreter married to Carol (Cardellini), and Clark (Bateman), who is Floyd’s good friend and Carol’s secret lover.
Floyd and Linda are lower middle-class living on the outskirts of St Louis, a second-tier American city in the state of Missouri. Every dollar is tight so Linda takes a side gig as an baseball umpire on weekends for the $85 a game fee and Floyd is constantly stressed out about his enormous tax debt and how to pay for private school for his neurodivergent stepson.
Floyd works with Clark, a weatherman at the local TV station who’s very fond of riding around in a recumbent bike. Yes, it looks as nerdy as it sounds, and that’s part of the point.
They become good mates, and Clark helps out Floyd with his financial pressures and health concerns, and in sharing their middle-age malaise and dissatisfaction with their sex lives, decide to sign-up for that hook-up dating app.
Not even halfway through the first episode, Floyd turns up dead in a pool house, and two detectives from competing jurisdictions, Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Plumb (Joy Sunday), are called in to investigate.
DTF St Louis is a murder mystery, but that is only one aspect of the series which is much more interested in how this very tangled web resulted in the death of one point of a love/friendship triangle.
Bateman is so good at playing these guys who present as respectable but are secretly dirtbags even if they would never think that of themselves (Michael Bluth may have seemed like the only non-crazy in Arrested Development but his actions are actually just as appalling as the rest of his family).
His Clark is wily, and as the series peels back the layers of its timeline out of sequence, you start to realise just how much.
With a title like DTF St Louis, there will obviously be a fair chunk of sex and sex-adjacent plot points, but, and no one is kink-shaming here, but it is very much not sexy. There’s no judgment on characters’ proclivities either, but there is something very frosty about, for example, the continued reminder that Floyd has an askew phallus.
Out of the seven episodes of this series, four were made available for review, so the ultimate success of the show will depend on how they land the plane. But, so far, it’s promising.
It’s a highly detailed universe where the banality of its suburban milieu is crucial but also never caricatured, and becomes part of the psychology of these characters and their preoccupations and betrayals.
At the very least, at just past the halfway mark, you’re not going to be able to pick the killer.
DTF St Louis is on HBO Max with new episodes weekly on Mondays
