“DTF St. Louis” ran for seven episodes before ending on April 12 with a finale that finally answered the show’s central mystery: Floyd Smernitch was the one who dosed the Bloody Mary and drank it knowing what would happen. The HBO limited series, now streaming on HBO Max, closed out with “No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street.”
Over those seven episodes, detectives Donoghue Homer and Jodie Plumb kept circling the likely suspects in the death of the Missouri ASL interpreter, who was found dead after drinking the poisoned drink at the Kevin Kline Community Pool Center. The list was messy from the start. Clark Forrest, Floyd’s best friend, was having an affair with Floyd’s wife, Carol, who had taken out a seven-figure life insurance policy on him. Floyd’s stepson Richard had a history of violent outbursts. And the series kept folding in dark comedy, from Carol’s side hustle in an umpire outfit to the made-up slang, including “voo,” used as shorthand for rendezvous.
That mix of murder investigation, infidelity and absurd detail was never just there to pad the case. Creator Steven Conrad said the show was about the loneliness and disappointment of reaching midlife and not liking what you find, a world where, as he put it, “You can’t tell anybody what is really hurting,” and “You can only pretend like some trivial things might help.” The story also made clear that Floyd and Clark had first bonded over the show’s namesake app, while Floyd met potential paramours under the name Modern Love.
The final stretch tied the personal wreckage to the crime itself. Floyd’s penis deformity was traced to Richard snapping after seeing Carol and Floyd argue, and in his final moments Floyd signed “I love you” to Richard. By the end, the show had resolved both the murder and the deformity subplot within its finite run, which is the point of a limited series: there is an ending, and this one committed to it. For anyone asking how many episodes of dtf st louis there are, the answer is seven — and that seventh episode is where the truth lands.
