What is DTF St. Louis about? Cast and plot explained — Bateman and Harbour's suburban mess was almost a true story
DTF St. Louis just picked up seven Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series, and a fresh wave of people are now googling a title their phone keeps trying to autocorrect into something worse.
Allow me. This is the show about middle-aged suburban despair, an infidelity app, and a corpse — and it is somehow the tender one of this year's winners.
The plot, minus the spoilers you'd regret
Steven Conrad's seven-episode HBO dark comedy is built on the world's saddest love triangle. David Harbour plays Floyd, a man whose marriage to Carol (Linda Cardellini) has flatlined in every conceivable department. Jason Bateman plays Clark Forrest, a local TV weatherman, Floyd's shiny new best friend — and, unbeknownst to Floyd, the man sleeping with Carol.
Clark introduces Floyd to a hookup app for married people called, yes, DTF St. Louis. Then Floyd turns up dead, and detectives get to excavate the full archaeological dig of secrets, affairs and midlife delusion underneath one beige cul-de-sac. It starts coarse, goes weird, and lands somewhere unexpectedly raw — the bait-and-switch is the whole trick.
The cast, briefly
- Jason Bateman as Clark Forrest — a weatherman with the moral spine of warm yogurt
- David Harbour as Floyd — sweet, stuck, doomed
- Linda Cardellini as Carol Smernitch — the wife at the center of the triangle, and the best argument for watching.
Four of the five Emmy categories cut from tonight's broadcast were swept by DTF St. Louis
The true story it almost was
Here's the part worth the price of admission. This project began life as an adaptation of a real murder trial — a New Yorker piece about a dentist, an affair, false identities and a lethal sedation. Harbour brought the article to Conrad himself, back when Pedro Pascal was still attached to the project (he left long before cameras rolled, presumably to go be in everything else).
Then Conrad walked away from the real case entirely. Partly craft, partly conscience: he said the team decided against true crime because "we were just going to make up one that existed," and admitted he felt uneasy building fiction on a living person — he "didn't want to misattribute any qualities to a real person."
The show kept the shape of the real story — triangle, betrayal, body — and threw out every actual human involved. That's not cowardice. That's the reason it works.
So: is it a true story? No. Was it almost one? Extremely. Does the fictional version include a poisoned canned Bloody Mary? I've said too much.
Previously we wrote: Tonight's Emmys will hand out 19 awards instead of 26 after five categories moved off NBC
