DTF St. Louis Review - Jason Bateman and David Harbour’s Devastating Bromance
Last night, HBO’s DTF St. Louis won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, and it felt not only deserved but almost inevitable in retrospect. Created, written, and directed entirely by Steven Conrad, best known for the underseen gems Patriot (2015-2018) and Perpetual Grace, LTD (2019), DTF St. Louis began its run in March and concluded in April, and it remains one of the most genuinely original pieces of television produced this year – a show that starts as a murder mystery, curdles into suburban infidelity melodrama, detours through buddy comedy, and ultimately reveals itself as something far stranger and more devastating: a portrait of male loneliness so acute it becomes, in its own peculiar way, a love story.
The structure alone marks Conrad as a storyteller willing to take genuine formal risks. Borrowing and radically expanding a technique often associated with Breaking Bad, every episode from the very first contains fragments of scenes from every other episode – Clark riding his recumbent bike through dark streets, Clark and Floyd embracing in the nude – stitched throughout as elliptical flash-forwards whose full context only accumulates over the course of the series. We learn what these images mean not through linear revelation but through repetition and recontextualization, each return to a moment adding a few more seconds, a slightly different angle, a fuller understanding of what we’re actually witnessing. It is a genuinely disorienting technique in the pilot and becomes, by the finale, the show’s entire emotional argument: that meaning in these men's lives accrues slowly, through repetition, rather than arriving all at once through conventional narrative revelation.
At the center of all this formal invention are Jason Bateman’s Clark Forrest and David Harbour’s Floyd Smernitch, suburban husbands and fathers whose unfulfilled marriages drive them toward a pact of mutual sexual revitalization through the titular app. Bateman does something genuinely unnerving with his established screen persona here – the smarm that has defined so much of his career work curdles into something fragile and twitchy. Harbour’s Floyd is a lovable loser in the most literal sense, an American Sign Language interpreter burdened with a body he’s ashamed of and – in one of the show's more audacious structural choices – a debilitatingly crooked penis whose full backstory takes the entire season to unfold. That the show can accommodate a season-long dick joke and a genuinely wrenching examination of male emotional isolation within the same seven hours, without either undermining the other, is a testament to how carefully Conrad has calibrated the material’s tonal register.
Linda Cardellini’s Carol, Floyd’s wife, deserves particular recognition as the show’s most intriguing performance. Cardellini has been one of television’s most reliable actresses since Freaks and Geeks (1999-2000), and here she brings genuine comic virtuosity – her scenes umpiring Little League games, her diminutive frame swallowed by oversized gear, play like something out of silent film comedy – alongside a mounting frustration and marginalization that the show is honest enough to fully register even as it centers Clark and Floyd’s relationship.
Because the real subject of DTF St. Louis, beneath all its structural gamesmanship and suburban satire, is the specific and largely unexamined intensity of male friendship at midlife, rendered here with a generosity toward its characters that never curdles into simple endorsement. “I’m just fucking lonely, man,” Clark tells Floyd at one point. “I’m lonely as shit.” That loneliness, and the men’s attempt to cure it through each other, produces something the show never fully condemns and never fully celebrates – a bond so complete that Clark’s own family, wife and daughters included, becomes essentially peripheral to his emotional life, a fact the show observes with clear-eyed sadness rather than judgment.
This places DTF St. Louis in a long tradition of explorations of midlife masculinity in crisis, evoking memories of The Full Monty (1997). What distinguishes Conrad’s contribution is the sheer formal originality of its execution: the repeated phrases – Cornhole, Outback Steakhouse, Jamba Juice – that accumulate meaning through pure repetition until they function as something closer to poetry than dialogue; the achingly gorgeous recurring images stitched throughout like embroidery; the uplifting 1970s pop soundtrack that consistently undercuts the mounting dread of where the story is actually heading. That dread, when it finally resolves, lands with the weight of tragedy dressed in comedy’s clothing, and the effect is genuinely disarming.
DTF St. Louis does not, in the end, offer especially novel conclusions about the stir-crazy dissatisfaction of middle-aged middle-class men. What it offers instead is an utterly original method of telling that familiar story – hypnotic, formally daring, unafraid of its own tonal eccentricities, and anchored by performances from Bateman, Harbour, and Cardellini that make the whole thing feel urgent rather than familiar. Last night’s Emmy was entirely deserved, and whatever Steven Conrad makes next, I will be there for it.