DTF St. Louis is really effing good

One sign of a really good writer is the ability to take a premise plenty of people could come up with and some could even tackle entertainingly and creatively—in the case of DTF St. Louis, it’s essentially “bored, stuck, middle-aged suburbanites dip their toes into extramarital affairs…with fatal results“—and package it in a way that nobody else could or would. Which is all to say: Steven Conrad is a really  “effing,” as one of the characters in this new HBO miniseries would put it, good writer. As was the case with Patriot, his very funny and offbeat spy drama for Prime Video in the 2010s, the selling point in the writer-director’s new dark comedy isn’t really found in its elevator pitch or plot mechanics or any of the themes you may expect from its subject matter. 

A dude with the hookup-app handle Moonage Daydream (a great, flirty Peter Sarsgaard) and a black-and-white pic of Bowie to go along with it might say, gently, “No one’s normal. It just looks that way from across the street.” But this isn’t American Beauty. It’s not even Election, although a scene of weatherman Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) moving his kids’ swing set specifically so he can ogle his next-door neighbor bending over might suggest otherwise. It’s a warmer, less cynical type of suburban satire (and unlike that savagely funny Alexander Payne film, people here aren’t presented as, essentially, garbage). In fact, a homicide detective (played by a reliably dry Richard Jenkins) insinuates that Moonage’s bit of wisdom is a cliché he didn’t write during an interrogation. And if you come away remembering any line from that scene—and one that speaks more to the spirit and sensibility of this particular show—it’d probably be: “That’s where all the dildos go.” 

There are three unfulfilled souls at the center of this story: Bateman’s aforementioned father of two, who high-fives his wife like a roomie and first brings up the show’s titular app; Clark’s onscreen sign-language interpreter and bud Floyd (a never-better David Harbour), a sweetly oblivious guy with a “weird dick” who owes tons in back taxes, maxes out his credit card buying a game that his dead-eyed stepson doesn’t even want to play, and makes out with a man, even though he’s straight, so as not to hurt his feelings; and Floyd’s fed-up wife Carol (Linda Cardellini), who moonlights as a little-league umpire despite knowing nothing about baseball and listens to podcasts about how to be more assertive in life. When one of them is discovered dead at a public pool during the offseason—next to a can of Bloody Mary and a photo of a naked guy with an Indiana Jones hat and whip—Jenkins’ detective and Joy Sunday’s “porn-positive” special-crimes officer try to piece everything together. (The two, as characters and performers, are pretty great, with an at-odds chemistry that softens over the course of the show.)