DTF St. Louis is down to its last stretch on HBO and Crave, with the seven-episode limited series nearing the end of a run that started as a suburban sex murder mystery and has become something else entirely. Steve Conrad created the show, wrote and directed every episode, and by the time episode six arrives, the fractured timeline that has been pulling the story apart finally clicks into place.
At the center is Clark, a local news weatherman in the St. Louis area played by Jason Bateman, and Floyd, an ASL interpreter played by David Harbour. They are men who love their spouses but cannot seem to connect with them anymore, especially sexually, and both are in debt with no clear way out. Clark starts sleeping with Floyd’s wife, Carol, played by Linda Cardellini, then introduces Floyd to an app where people hook up to get it on. That setup gives the series its title, since DTF stands for Down To, well, Fornicate.
Carol also has an adolescent son from a previous relationship named Richard, who has borderline personality disorder, and that family strain hangs over the story as much as the affair does. Joy Sunday plays Plumb, and Richard Jenkins plays Homer, the detectives drawn in after someone ends up dead. The case gives the show its procedural spine, but Conrad keeps returning to the same scenes from different angles, so what first looks like a story about desire slowly becomes one about how lonely people keep failing each other in ordinary life.
Read Also: Pat Mcafee return in WWE title angle sparks backstage frustration
That shift is what makes the series work. Clark and Floyd even sign up for paintball, but neither wants to shoot anyone, which is as close as the show comes to a thesis statement about two men who seem trapped inside their own passivity. The humor is still there, and episode four delivers a rap about acing a life insurance physical — described in the series with the kind of deadpan confidence that turns it into “the whitest rap in human history” — but the comedy never hides the sadness underneath.
Read Also: Kevin Frazier Hosts The Neighborhood Farewell Special for 8 Seasons
The show’s last episodes are likely to make the point plain. The sex plot is the hook, but the deeper story is about male friendship, disappointment and the quiet damage that comes when people who think they know each other keep missing the truth. By the time DTF St. Louis reaches its finale, the mystery is no longer who died. It is how Clark and Floyd got so lost while standing right next to each other.
