It sounds a lot like a US police series, but ignore the awful title. DTF St. Louis does have a police procedural sub-plot, but it’s definitely not generic television.
Tennessee Williams once said: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Suburban Missouri looks as normal as most America suburbs can get. However, in this common-or-garden part of St. Louis, a weird, middle-class wife-swapping threesome holds court.
Local TV weather man Clark (Jason Bateman) has become best buddies with his on-air American Sign Language translator Floyd (David Harbour). Floyd is constantly shamed by his weight, and has lost any sexual interest in his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini) after she begins wearing baseball umpire attire. Clark coaxes Floyd into joining an app for married people wanting sexual hookups without commitment, and nothing is ever the same again.
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| Jason Bateman (left) Linda Cardellini (middle) David Harbour (right) |
A minor character, played by Peter Saarsgard, who calls himself “Modern Love” while using a social media avatar of David Bowie in a dress, delivers the defining one-liner: “No-one’s normal. It just looks that way from across the street”.
Showrunner Steven Conrad, writes all seven episodes, his black humour and pathos never falling into cheap satire. Instead, his characters are all fully formed and congruent, and his empathetic dialogue underpins their aching, compassionate loneliness.
Bateman, and especially Harbour, excel in developing a strange and weird, but ultimately loving relationship between the two men. Cardellini, deadpans her way as Carol and the police (Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday) can only fumble, wide-eyed through their interviews, destabilized by the people they investigate over an apparent murder.
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| Richard Jenkins (left) Joy Sunday (right) |
It’s brave television, if at times seemingly repetitive and occasionally meandering.
*Soundtrack: Needle-drops include Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Bob Dylan, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin, Cream, Frankie Valli, The Zombies and The Temptations. The opening title music is The 5th Dimension’s version of Let The Sunshine In, and as the final episode concludes there’s an exhilarating The Flesh Failures (Let The Sunshine In). A little difficult to track down, it comes from the original 1968 Broadway cast recording of Hair, sung by cast member Melba Moore, and can be found on YouTube. Among the many comments:
“I finally found it! I got here from DTF St. Louis”
“Crazy how hard it was to find this song from DTF St. Louis…awesome”
“DTF brought me here…I had chills when this song came on at the end of the last episode”
“This is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever heard”
“Great song, great artist, great series”.
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