6 hours ago
11
Never trust a man who rides a recumbent bicycle. That seems to be the first lesson provided by DTF St Louis, a new seven-part dark comedy starring Jason Bateman, David Harbour and Linda Cardellini, and who – honestly – could fail to get behind such a message?
Bateman plays Clark Forrest, local weatherman, microcelebrity and recumbent bicycler round his little patch of St Louis, Missouri. He becomes fast friends with a sign language interpreter, Floyd (Harbour), when they are sent to report on a violent storm together and Floyd saves him from being decapitated by a flying stop sign. Floyd is a goodhearted soul with a mutinous stepson, a hot wife and Peyronie’s disease. That’s when the penis acquires an abnormal curvature that can make penetration difficult, due to a connective tissue problem that is often associated with middle age.
Penetration difficulties, however, are something of a moot point because ever since Floyd saw his wife, Carol (Cardellini), in her padded baseball-umpiring gear he has had problems seeing her sexually. We see her in the gear, and we take his point. We also see her face as she watches him reread Batman comics shirtless, doughy stepdad-bod on display, and wonder if the umpire gear does not offer more than one kind of protection for her.
Alas for all concerned, Clark has never seen Carol in her umpire gear and is already interested in swinging. He introduces Floyd to an app he’s found for people looking to spice things up without endangering their marriages or travelling too far – DTF St Louis.
After a modicum of explanation (“Down to fuck”) and hesitation, Floyd agrees to sign up. For those who have followed the headlines surrounding the release of Lily Allen’s latest album, in which she effectively accuses her ex-husband Harbour of – well, let’s call it “adjacent stuff” – this will be delicious. For Harbour, probably less so. The show’s publicist, however, must be torn.
Until this point in proceedings, the show has been threatening to become too whimsical for its own good. Umpire pads? Peyronie’s disease? Recumbent bicycles? One more idiosyncrasy and you are officially an exhaustingly effortful endeavour. Fortunately, from there, Steven Conrad’s creation (he writes and directs) gains confidence: via the introduction of a murder mystery thread, it starts to pursue the meatier question of what marriage and middle age is all about, and whether listening to motivational podcasts has ever truly helped anyone through anything.
Is malaise inevitable? Where does it come from? Detective Homer (Richard Jenkins), half of the odd-couple duo investigating the suspicious death, looks down sorrowfully at the corpse they have found at dawn in the local sports centre (the Kevin Kline Junior Community Pools – this really does push it up against the “effortful endeavour” boundary but it also made me laugh, so we’ll let it go) surrounded by gay porn. “You shouldn’t have to get up so early just to be you,” he says. “It should be an all day kind of thing.” You don’t need to be hiding your sexuality to feel the resonance of that past a certain age. You just have to note the accretions that have gathered over the years – of duty, responsibility, friendships and acquaintances made up more of convenience than genuine connection that have formed a cloak under which your true self may be hiding or quietly giving up.
DTF St Louis asks whether sex can solve anything. Is sexual dissatisfaction ever just that or is it always a proxy for a greater emotional need or harbinger of an existential crisis? And can exploring your every kink (and there are a mixture of sexy and hilarious intimate scenes across the seven episodes) with someone new at least take your mind off things for long enough to get you through another day? And isn’t it worth a try? Especially if, as Carol discovers, you’re lucky enough to have a lover with a particular proclivity that means you can still get through your day’s admin while servicing him. Frankly, I’d urge men to put that as a USP in their profiles.
The leads all turn in wonderful performances, as do Jenkins and Joy Sunday as his special crimes officer partner. Bateman’s ability – first widely on display in Juno – to infuse his everyman persona with carefully calibrated degrees of “creep” has never been more perfectly deployed. But everyone here has an odd, difficult part – especially once the whimsy has worn off – and making them congruent as well as believable individually is an achievement all of its own. You may well find yourself DTFinishing the whole thing in a single watch.
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DTF St Louis aired on Sky Atlantic and is on Now in the UK. In the US and Australia it is on HBO Max
