Matt Schimkowitz
Never pulling the rug for shock value, DTF St. Louis always uncovers a deeper, more tragic reality with each revelation, often because someone wants to spare another’s feelings. Like Kevin nixing his ‘vous with Floyd, each answer generated the kinds of feelings Clark had for his best friend, complicating each reveal with heartbreaking character grace notes. No one’s normal; it just looks that way from across the street. Carol (Linda Cardellini) is not only innocent; she’s Umpire Of The Year. Clark Forrest isn’t just the weatherman; he’s a guy who goes to extreme lengths to prove his best friend’s ability to arouse. And of course, there’s the expert sideways heightening of the dick story’s finale. But sometimes those complications were downright wholesome, like boob and butt guy Homer’s big kink being a fetching lace bra. Floyd’s accidental overdose and Richard being the second biker may have been a bit predictable, but they unraveled in ironically crushing ways, with simple misinterpretation leading to great pain. As fun as this show has been, it had to end on a down note. DTF St. Louis was about the death of a wonderful man who mattered.
Danette Chavez
“It’s been a really confusing summer.” So says Clark Forrest of the weeks spent cheating on his wife (a non-presence) and bonding with Floyd Smernitch, the teddy bear of a guy he’d been cucking (with his enthusiastic consent). Though the story beats were mostly telegraphed, DTF St. Louis creator Steven Conrad tried to underline a sense of confusion with a chopped-up timeline and mannered dialogue that was meant to emphasize how bewildering the story developments were supposed to be to a normie like Donoghue Homer. While I never quite wanted to stop watching it—Jason Bateman and David Harbour should shoot hoops and the shit in more series—the show wore on me after a while by leaving voids in place of where Carol’s characterization and its own sense of setting should have been. (Not only is the geography off, but there’s no way Floyd Smernitch would have gone completely ignored in a hook-up app for people in the Midwest. There’s a whole song about his appeal!)
DTF St. Louis was alternately straightforward and muddled; its pleasures, like Clark and Floyd’s deepening friendship, were obvious, along with the palpable suburban ennui and garden-variety midlife crises. But unnecessary quirks obscured whatever Conrad was trying to say about desire, which, just like male loneliness, has distinct flavors. Like everyone else here, I watched the show for the character study (which ended up limited to Clark and Floyd), so the murder mystery, a device meant to pull in viewers every week, was always secondary. But the finale undercuts that element along with the central friendship. (If Floyd was that fragile in those moments, then Clark looks like a shitty friend for leaving him at that time.) Perhaps it’s because I’ve noticed a recent rise in “mercy killings/suicidal ideations as tidy endings” in TV and film, but Floyd’s suicide feels like a cheap ploy intended to bestow some twisted honor upon him. In the final moments of the flashback, Floyd assumes, likely incorrectly, that all he can do for Richard and Carol at that point is leave them with the life-insurance money. But the very public investigation into his death would give the insurance company all the justification it needed to deny the payout. It would have been just as tragic if Floyd accidentally overdosed on the Amphezyne cocktail—yet another miscalculation for him, just like how he misjudged Carol’s willingness to struggle for their entire marriage.
William Hughes
“Did we just team up to not solve a murder?” It’s one of about eight different lines from “No One’s Normal” that could serve as a neat summation of DTF St. Louis, as the series finally stripped away its fun and games with the trappings of suburban noir to reveal that there’s no killer crueler than loneliness. Leading up to the finale, I’d let myself be seduced by the show’s homicidal cosplay, wondering if Clark Forrest had become the patsy in a complicated game of insurance fraud perpetrated by two master schemers. Which was, of course, ridiculous: Femme fatales don’t engineer deadly affairs with deceptive Jamba Juice orders just as their partners don’t execute honeytraps with spiked cocktail cans and a summer of lingering looks. What killed Floyd Smernitch was simple: a moment of seeing himself honestly in his stepson’s eyes, the need for something he didn’t already have left nakedly exposed. And we, in turn, are left with a haunting, funny finale to a haunting, funny series. I have no idea if Steven Conrad has any ideas kicking around for a follow-up, but I’d personally watch five more seasons of Joy Sunday and the incomprehensibly good Richard Jenkins failing to solve “crimes” like this together.
Saloni Gajjar
DTF St. Louis opened with Floyd Smernitch talking about “grown-up Cs” as an indication that he viewed himself as being below average, not having discovered or shared with others what made him special. It makes his decision in the finale to kill himself unsurprising but heartbreaking nonetheless. HBO’s series pointedly and often tenderly illuminated how Floyd, Clark, and Carol are more than what they appear to be. They’re not jaded only because of dull suburbia but because of unfulfilled desires and ambitions. It pushed them to experiment with each other in different ways without (much) shame or fear. But there’s only so far you can go, as we see with Floyd at the end. I found the episode to be a thoughtful, depressing, and oddly realistic conclusion to the show’s meditation on middle-aged malaise, tight-knit male friendships, and sexual discoveries. I wish it weren’t packaged as a whodunit, because that raises expectations about who the murderer might be. But by the end of the final hour, I came to appreciate series creator Steven Conrad’s decision as it allowed Homer and Jodie to come to terms with the fact that…well, the episode’s title states it better than I could.
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