[COLUMN] The Surprising Sweetness of DTF - St. Louis | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for DTF - St. Louis, the recently-wrapped show which is now streaming all seven episodes on HBO Max. It’s a charming little diversion, in large part because it takes a premise that feels inherently exploitative and finds a surprisingly sincere core. I was very charmed by it. Be aware that the show is a mystery, and this piece spoils many of the twists and turns of that mystery. We are, in fact, DTS. That is to say, down to spoil.

Across the seven episodes of DTF – St. Louis, there is a significant emphasis on American Sign Language interpreter Floyd Smernitch’s (David Harbour) curved penis. As a result of some incident in the past, his penis curves almost exactly 90° in the middle. The series repeatedly shows pictures of it, and draws attention to the various complications that it creates in his relationship with his wife, Carol Love-Smernitch (Linda Cardellini).

This deformity becomes a strange obsession for the characters who encounter it. When Floyd befriends local weather man Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), Clark repeatedly presses him on how that happened. Detective Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday), who is brought in to investigate Floyd’s mysterious death, presses Carol about it, even though it is of no relevance to the case. There is a sense that these characters – and perhaps the audience – are drawn to the luridness of injury.

DTF – St. Louis takes its time explaining what happened. At various points, Floyd starts to tell the story, but is interrupted. He talks about a trip to Chicago for a life-changing job interview. While there, he encountered a mentally disturbed man walking in traffic. Floyd ventured out into the street to rescue the man. Clark wonders if that might be when it happened, if he got hit by a car or something. It is not. It is just something that Floyd remembers about that day.

When he picks up the story later on, he remembers walking through the streets of Chicago and catching a class for the hard of hearing through a window. He talks about being profoundly moved by that, and deciding in that moment that it is what he wants to do with his life. He recalls travelling home to tell his wife that he skipped the job interview. He remembers her tears as he told her that he wanted to pursue a career – a passion – that could not safely and reliably provide for their family.

When Floyd does eventually, in the finale, get around to explaining exactly what happened to his penis, it is an anticlimax. It turns out that Carol’s behaviorally challenged son Richard (Arlan Ruf) snuck into their bedroom and hit Floyd with a baseball bat, because – as far as this young man was concerned – Floyd had made his mother cry. It’s a tossed-off detail, almost an afterthought. There is a sense that, to Floyd, this injury is the least important thing that happened on that day.

This little plot thread that runs across the seven-episode miniseries is effectively DTF – St. Louis in a microcosm. It captures a great deal of what writer and director Steve Conrad is saying with the series about the subject matter, the characters and perhaps the wider culture. The premise of DTF – St. Louis is inherently sensationalist, unfolding in the aftermath of a mysterious death of a man that expands to involve hook-up apps, extramarital affairs, gay pornography, life insurance policies and other secrets.

In a sense, DTF – St. Louis is riffing on pop culture’s voyeuristic obsession with “true crime”, the tendency to boil local intimate tragedies down to salacious gossip for mass consumption. That impulse arguably extends into fictional crime procedurals, with shows like Criminal Minds, CSI and Law & Order: SVU often tending to pathologize any sexual desires, identities or activities outside narrow proscribed boundaries. They invite the viewer to become voyeurs, a modern freakshow.

The premise of DTF – St. Louis repeatedly threatens to descend into that sort of crime procedural sensationalism as the details of Floyd’s death unfurl. It turns out that Floyd, a happily married man, was on the eponymous hook-up app and even had an encounter with a gay man, known as “Modern Love” (Peter Sarsgaard). Meanwhile, Clark and Carol were having an affair, during which Carol convinced Clark to take out life insurance on Floyd, worrying about her family’s financial security.

As the miniseries progresses, these stock crime story clichés become more complex and more nuanced. Floyd becomes aware of the sexual relationship between Carol and Clark, which involves copious amounts of roleplay in a dingy motel. However, Floyd is not enraged. Instead, Floyd appreciates that Clark can offer Carol something that he cannot. Floyd begins watching Clark with Carol, even offering Clark helpful advice on how to satisfy her.

Conrad approaches his characters with empathy. The friendship between Clark and Floyd is treated as sincere and affectionate, a male friendship that threatens to blur boundaries and cross lines, but is instead rooted in mutual respect and love, albeit in ways that are decidedly unconventional. Clark’s silence when talking to the police in the first half of the season initially appears to be guilt or shame, but is eventually revealed to be an effort to protect Floyd’s image in the eyes of his stepson Richard.

In the first episode, Floyd is established as trying to connect with Richard, reading a prepared speech about “grown-up C’s”, the fear of going through adult life on autopilot doing just enough to get by without actually living. Floyd is ostensibly imparting a life lesson to Richard, but he is really speaking to an existential ennui within himself. The three characters at the center of DTF – St. Louis all want something more than what they have, and the show refuses to treat this as a character failing.

When Clark first meets Carol, he lies to her. He claims to own and operate an underwater demolition company to make himself seem more exciting than a local weatherman. Carol tells her own lies trying to catch Clark’s attention, hanging around the smoothie bar where she knows that he will be and changing her order to match his as a way of generating conversation. These are small lies to begin with, but they inevitably spiral outwards.

While the midlife crisis elements of DTF – St. Louis recall Conrad’s script for Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man, another dark comedy about a television weather man (Nicolas Cage) having a breakdown, the show’s focus on suburban ennui cannot help but evoke films like Sam Mendes’ American Beauty. Indeed, it feels notable that Conrad’s show emerges as part of a recent wave of television series about the seedy underbelly of suburbia, from Them to The ’Burbs.

This makes a certain amount of sense. The suburbs have long been a preoccupation for American storytellers, most often during periods of stifling social conservatism like the Eisenhower era of the 1950s, the Reagan era of the 1980s or the Bush era of the 2000s. It is only fitting that popular culture should find itself drawn back to them during the Trump era. Indeed, The ’Burbs is a television series adapting Joe Dante’s 1989 film, starring Tom Hanks, demonstrating how cyclical this is.

The suburbs are a fascinating object, a vast sprawl of houses that are designed to look more-or-less identical, coded with traditional, wholesome and often conservative imagery like the white picket fences, the rose gardens and the stay-at-home wife. This fantasy of “suburban bliss” underpins a lot of contemporary social and political nostalgia, the desire to return to some imagined past. Inevitably, it is interesting to imagine what is stirring behind the doors of those largely identical homes.

There can be a tendency to sensationalize or pathologize suburbia, to treat it as a strange land populated by alien beings that are recognizable but also surreal. Many depictions of suburbia have a voyeuristic quality, feeling almost anthropological in nature. The industries that tend to fixate on the perceived perversity of suburban life are often based in urban areas on the coasts, creating the sense of outsiders peering in, eager to gaze upon whatever perversity lurks beneath the rose garden.

Part of what makes DTF – St. Louis such a disarming television show is the compassion that it shows to its various characters. This is perhaps most obvious with Carol, who is initially presented as a broad caricature of a suburban housewife – a “Karen”, for lack of a better world. Carol is aggressive, hectoring, entitled. She insists on being addressed by “Love-Smernitch”, not just “Smernitch.” She passive-aggressively asserts her dominance in conversation by insisting other characters “speak up.”

Carol is constantly obsessed with status and money. She frets about the economic stability of her household. She argues with service workers, whether at the local juice bar or at a bicycle repair shop. She has a sealed criminal record. She often has little patience for Floyd’s flights of fancy, and is decidedly more pragmatic and less romantic than her husband, believing that her son Richard would do better socially if he tried to blend in rather than stand out. She initially appears to be a monster.

However, as the series unfolds, Carol becomes a more sympathetic character viewed holistically. Her sealed criminal record was for stealing toilet rolls as a teenager, to provide for her impoverished family. Her anxiety of status comes from her own experiences growing up poor and her need to spare Richard that. She does clearly love Floyd, especially for the characteristics that she knows that she pragmatically has to counterbalance, like his kindness and his impulsiveness.

This is perhaps most obvious in the show’s treatment of Carol’s side job as an umpire at local baseball games, to help pay the family’s bills. Early episodes had treated that job as a punchline or a source of frustration. Floyd confesses that the costume – and Carol’s constant rehearsing in it – has made it difficult for him to remain sexually aroused while around her. She uses the game as a way to get close to Clark, attending professional games with him while claiming to be doing research.

However, in the final episode, it’s revealed that Carol was recently awarded the title of “Umpire of the Year” for her work in the role. Her fellow umpire, Stephen Queece (Asher Miles Fallica), explains that Carol took the job – and her responsibility to the children playing – seriously. All the small moments that appeared absurd or cynical in the abstract – rehearsing in the suit, attending the games with Clark – are revealed to be part of what made Carol a unique person.

For a series that is ostensibly playing with the tropes and conventions of modern voyeuristic crime fiction, built around the promise of exposing the seedy underbelly of the suburbs, DTF – St. Louis is ultimately quite tender. It is eventually revealed that there was no murder at all. Floyd killed himself, dosing his own drink and downing it alone in a pool locker room, after he realizes that Richard has seen Floyd and Clark dancing together in their underwear.

For all that DTF – St. Louis teases salacious reveals and sexual deviance, the story is ultimately a very basic story about characters trying to navigate the anxieties and the crises of middle age. As complicated as the relationship between Carol, Clark and Floyd becomes, the truth is simply that Floyd was battling depression and frustration. He was trying to find something that would fulfil him, something that gave him purpose and meaning, something that provided a lust for life.

It’s a very human story. Part of what is ultimately so impressive about DTF – St. Louis is the way that it ultimately strips away a lot of the sensationalist trappings of these kinds of stories to tell a more universal and humanist drama.