DTF St. Louis, a darkly funny miniseries created by Steven Conrad, was initially supposed to be based on a real scandal (covered in The New Yorker article “My Dentist’s Murder Trial“). Over time, it evolved into an original concept that Conrad came up with alongside the show’s star/co-executive producer David Harbour because, as the former tells The A.V. Club, he didn’t want to blur the lines between reality and make believe while writing a story about people’s desires.
The seven-part HBO series follows three adults (played by small-screen staples Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, and Harbour) who indulge in infidelity and a hookup app, which results in one of them ending up dead during its first hour. Conrad, who previously created shows like the off-kilter spy dramedy Patriot, stop-motion animated series Ultra City Smiths, and neo-noir thriller Perpetual Grace, LTD, fulfills his desire to write about “middle-aged emptiness and a bad decision that involved sex” here—and the results can be very funny.
The A.V. Club also spoke to Conrad about how a conversation about kinks influenced the show, why he sees Gene Wilder in his collaborator Harbour, and what the last few DTF St. Louis episodes will shape up to be.
The A.V. Club: What made you pivot from adapting a New Yorker article to working on something original?
Steven Conrad: I’d never done a series or any narrative writing that had a relationship to a real story like The New Yorker article. I recognized the possibility of its setting with middle-aged people who are still hungry in their sexual lives. I wanted to write about that. So it landed at the right time when that was already what I wanted to make. I had already started along those lines with my own story, with various dilemmas for my characters. The challenge for me, at that time, was to take that make-believe world I was already concocting and see if I could fit it into these real circumstances from the article. But coming up with too much when it comes to real people’s lives is risky, and I don’t think it lends itself to anything worthwhile if you say your job is to make believe. My details didn’t align with what I considered to be the facts of that case. The appetites of the characters weren’t the same. I didn’t want to misattribute any qualities to a real person. So, David Harbour and I just spent more time on [our story]. We wanted to focus on middle-aged emptiness and a bad decision that involved sex. So I started puzzling out people in my own life, wondering about the state of their lives, where their bad decisions were coming from, and what the consequences were.
The watershed moment for us was the idea that there’s this married person’s hookup app along the lines of Ashley Madison and someone being susceptible to the promise that you can have a stable family life and hook up with someone else who also has a similar life and there will be no consequences to that. People diving headfirst into that type of invitation seemed unwise to me. I wondered about what if a smart person was doing that and why they would want to do it. The answer [in the show] becomes that there’s desperation to feel something and a need to satisfy something. Chasing that is when you start saying to yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” without really having a sound appreciation for just how bad it could get. Once David and I thought of the DTF St. Louis app idea, we thought of having a setting where a detective sees this seemingly normal set of people who have passions that they don’t share with anyone else, including those with whom they share their lives. I had a friend talk to me about kinks once, and he said something about being married to his spouse but also being married to his kinks. And he said to me, “We live together because my kinks come with me. I didn’t choose them, but it’s till death do us part, and don’t I have an obligation to them?”
AVC: That’s such a fascinating way to put it.
SC: That’s what I thought, too, and that made me go, “Okay, what do you owe your kinks because they’re not going anywhere?” And once we knew we were going to play with that idea, we said, “Okay, what if you give your kinks to somebody who’s essentially a stranger?” And then they find out each other’s secrets, and it causes tension, conflict, and suspense. So that was the evolution of DTF. St. Louis.
AVC: How did you know David, who was involved from the start, was the right fit for Floyd Smernitch? And how did casting Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini affect who Clark Forrest and Carol Love-Smernitch ended up as?
SC: Yes, David was already with me on the project. He’s an actor I recognize as having this tremendous empathy that he draws from. That’s just from my eye as an audience member before even having known the guy. You just secretly believe there’s this whole life going on inside of him. He’s also a march-forward performer. He’ll keep marching forward to try to save himself despite bad decisions and circumstances. It’s the same quality in Floyd, who is going to get lost and try to get found in the show. Floyd’s going to end up making some decisions that aren’t going to be easy to accept for people who are in committed relationships, and his appetites might confuse people whose tastes run to the more expected. But it doesn’t mean that he isn’t as superbly human as anybody.
David, just going by the light behind his eyes, he made me feel like I liked him. It’s just that simple for me. When I was very young and had started loving movies, I really liked Gene Wilder, who just never seemed like he should be a leading man, but you couldn’t take your eyes off him. David has that appeal, but he also has a sexuality that I think creates real power. That’s why he made a perfect Floyd. He was willing to explore and allow his body to change in a way that was likely for Floyd and not so likely for an actor.
Jason is smart in the sense that I’ve always liked his intelligence as an actor, so you can believe he could play Clark such that he’d look at Floyd and see something beautiful inside him. It’s important at some point that we ask the show’s audience if they believe what Clark is actually saying about Floyd at the end of episode two. As I said, Jason’s an intelligent actor, so I think the bargain will be that people want to believe him. Linda has the capacity to be all the things that Carol has to be, who is someone not fully sure of her home life, a little overly familiar with her husband, capable of wearing the same umpire clothes three days in a row, overwhelmed by bills, and a mother in a difficult relationship with her young boy. She’s struggling. You have to believe that she’s struggling, but also believe the reveal that there are still sexual dynamics that exist in her that will allow her to electrify the show’s world. Linda is perfectly suited to allow the audience to believe both of these sides are in one woman.
AVC: Can you talk about the non-linear structure of the show and why you wanted some of the scenes to be repeated in the episodes, except with additional context to help see them in a new light?
SC: Well, that’s a good pickup because there’s a clean line that you’re probably feeling without anyone explicitly saying that that’s what’s happening. Those different variations of shared events are happening between three characters who share intimacy in some way with each other and one of whom ends up dead. These shared events are trying to be understood by this older detective, Donoghue Homer, played by Richard Jenkins, who’s challenged by a freedom of sexuality that doesn’t exist for him. His imagination can’t take him there directly. So his mind is being opened up by the plausibility of it. So is the emphasis that his younger partner, Joy Sunday’s Jodie Plumb, is putting on the fact that people are more complicated than he’s allowing himself to believe, especially in the quiet suburbs. So, seeing things in these widening concentric circles of understanding, it relates directly to Donoghue as well, and it continues to do that in the show for each episode until the truth of all the events is revealed.
Another reason I was hoping that the structure would work for the show is that I wanted to be clear to our audience that there’s a keen sense of intelligence in that police department and also that Jodie is so likable that you hope she’s capable of changing Donoghue’s mind over time. Hopefully, you’re secretly cheering for him to come around, which means you’re secretly hoping that he discovers the truth about what’s going on and then accepts it. Episodes five, six, and seven, in particular, are the journey to the truth. Now, whether or not the detective is prepared enough to accept it is really the big question of the final hour of DTF.
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.
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