‘DTF St. Louis’ Review: Can Homer Solve the Midwestern Mystery?

Steven Conrad’s new HBO-miniseries journeys through the American Midwest, visiting the strange variety saloon of suburban folks trying to extricate themselves from the everydayness of suburban life. Their key to escapism, you guessed it right folks, an app called DTF (down to f**k). The show, as the logline puts it, revolves around a love triangle between three adults experiencing what you call a midlife malaise, which eventually leads to one of them ending up dead.

DTF (the app) allows people turned off by their spouses an opportunity to explore options and make their “dreams” come true. Convolution in the escapist-nasty-fun domain inevitably leads to not exactly multiplication so much as exponentiation in the consequence domain, the magnitude of which this reviewer can’t comment on by virtue of HBO letting us access only the first four episodes. Nonetheless, there’s a payback for every bit of escapism that’s for sure.

The three body problem in this case: Floyd (David Harbour), his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini) and her (well not exactly) lover (and Floyd’s bestie) Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), a weather-man withering away. Floyd, an intermediate-level hip-hopper, guy with a hummingbird heart, who on the scale of feeling-left-out, jives with and stands up as a father figure to his stepson, and verily, this father-son relationship stands out the strongest in the show so far, the other aspects being, well, a hit-and-miss. On top of that he also got Peyronie’s disease, and that’s where the dame-issue seeps in, apart from Floyd not being a fan of his wife’s umpire costume.

Carol, the suburban wife working as a part-time umpire for weekends and her whatever-ship with Clark Forrest or as his friends call him, the bang master, paints the canvas of the show with a stroke of true-crime atmosphere. Investigating the case are Special Crimes Officer, Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) and Detective Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins). They can solve the case, but can they, uhm, save the show?

To say that this reviewer is getting kicks out of the drama and the detective work from the show so far would be a lie; the first four episodes occupy the liminal space existing between decent and painfully average, though the optimist in me wishes for the show to get a grip in the episodes to follow. The show is tenuous and janky in terms of direction, with super-dull staging, and editing lacking any sense of rhythm, which feels more of a Max show than an HBO original if you know what I mean. The needledrops don’t actively work since the image is in strong contradiction with the material, which on paper might seem interesting to work with. Here’s to hoping that the show lands the ending.

DTF. St Louis stars David Harbour, Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, Joy Sunday, and Richard Jenkins. The series begins streaming on HBO and HBO Max on March 1 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT.

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