It took me maybe fifteen minutes
into the first episode to start to engage with DTF St. Louis Steven
Conrad's wonderful new comic limited series. Much of it was so atonally
inconsistent with basically all of the quality programming I've come to know
and mostly love about HBO as a long time viewer that it didn't start to connect
with me until then. Then I started to enjoy it on a surface level for all of
the weird comic touches. And now after two episodes I'm beginning to love it
because I think Conrad is trying to do something below the surface that I of
all people can appreciate.
DTF St. Louis is initially the story of two
friends in a Missouri suburb: Clark Forrest, the weatherman for the local news
network and Floyd Smernitch, the sign language interpreter who works for the
station where the two of them seem to have become friends during a hurricane.
In the first episode the two of them have their wives and kids hang out when
Floyd schedules a cornhole tournament where Floyd introduces Clark and his wife
to Carol, his wife who makes a living umpiring Little League games. Floyd is a ridiculously nice person from the
start who keeps trying to be a good parent to his stepson who keeps throwing
rocks at the house. He keeps trying to play games his stepson clearly doesn't
want to play and he keeps pushing him away.
Not long after the cornhole game
Clark introduces Floyd to a new app called DTF ST. LOUIS. (The DTF as
the site makes clear immediately means 'down to fuck'.) It's apparently an app
where a bunch of middle-aged married people engage in one-night stands with
random strangers and do nothing to effect their marriage. Floyd agrees to the site;
Clark engages with the profiles.
Not long after this Floyd is found
dead in the bathing rest stop with his penis exposed. (Floyd disfigured his
penis in a bizarre incident we still don't know the reason for.) This leads to
the investigation of a St. Louis inspector name Horner and the Twyla
investigator named Jodie Plumb. Horner is in his sixties and white, Plumb is
African-American female. The sign of disagreement comes when Homer thinks that
Floyd came here to pleasure himself to gay porn and suffered a stroke. He's
doing so to a picture of Indiana Jones in a magazine. Jodie doesn't buy it
because no one does so to magazines any more and certainly not to this kind of
porn. "I'm porn positive" she tells Homer. Cut to her coolly
searching online through online Indiana Jones porn with the same kind of
detachment they look at blood spatter on CSI. This was my first clue
that this wasn't the typical HBO series and also when I started to enjoy it.
Eventually the autopsy comes back
and it turns out Floyd was given a lethal overdose of drugs in a Bloody Mary
mix. Plumb goes through security footage of the bathhouses and finds footage of
one of the most bizarre bicycles, one that we know Clark rides to work every
morning. Plumb then tracks it down and talks down to the salesman. "I've
only sold two of these and they're both to the same person," Plumb nods
this is with the decorum and solemnity that Joe Friday would be proud of.
Naturally they arrest Clark
Forrest in the midst of his most recent weather broadcast with a huge number of
officers and a combination of serious and farce. The first episode ends with
Clark saying to Homer. "I'm not afraid to talk to you." "Then
talk to me."
Then we see the second episode and
the comedy really comes to life as we see Clark and Carol flirt over how he
runs a business that seems to involve deep sea destruction and the two of them
talk first about this and then about meeting at Jamba Juice. We then see Clark
and Floyd hanging out at a dance recital where he does his workout, but then
his car can't get started. Carol then has to take a bus and there's an endless
apology about buses. Then Carol and Clark meet, possibly at random, possibly by
design, at the local Jamba Juice and have the same shake together. Then they go
to a Cardinals game. Then they decide to have an affair at the Embassy Suites
where they agree to discuss each other's dreams. Not long after that Clark
hears about DTF St. Louis at his newscast and sets up Floyd for it. And
I think I'll stop talking about the plot right now.
I need to be clear that this is
one of the funniest shows I've seen on HBO in a while, even funnier than some
of the series that have been called comedies. But what makes me love it is that
I'm wondering if Steven Conrad, who has written and directed every episode, is
actually parodying Peak TV and HBO itself.
Now's the time to discuss the cast
because it is all-star. Clark is played by Jason Bateman, who is connected to
both some of the greatest dramas and comedies of the 21st century
such as Ozark and Arrested Development. David Harbour, as we all
know, has just ended his stint as Sheriff Harper on Stranger Things. Linda
Cardellini has been a part of every kind of television series since Freaks
and Geeks and can do both drama and comedy perfectly, whether it is in a
niche series like Bloodline or laugh out loud comedy like Dead To Me.
Richard Jenkins has been part of the revolution since his work as Nathaniel
Fisher on Six Feet Under and has won his only Emmy for his work in the
HBO limited series Olive Kitteridge. And we've got a few other standouts
from recent TV masterpieces such as Peter Sarsgaard in a role I wouldn't dare
spoil.
Now consider that it is written
with the kind of out-of-chronological order that we've gotten all too used to
in the era of Peak TV and we keep getting random shots of swing sets as well as
musical montages such as Clark being arrested to 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine
Anymore'. This has the format of a
procedural with a meeting of unlikely partners as detectives who disagree about
everything and its set in the suburbs with the idea that none of us know our
neighbors. And all of the dialogue is being delivered with the kind of
straightforwardness and bluntness that we've come to expect from every series
on TV – except that it's being done to describe the tricks on online profiles,
the lies are about the kinds of smoothies that are being ordered and the
secrets have to do with whether encounters involve assplay or not. Oh and did I
mention that the opening credits show Jason Bateman and David Harbour engaging
in power moving and dancing to 'Let The Sunshine In?"
I've basically described elements
that are individually and even collectively parts of so many of the great HBO
limited series that we've been watching over the last decade. But in the hands
of Conrad all of them are treated with a complete lack of the
seriousness that drives all of these limited series I've seen. It's like Conrad
decided to satirize everything from True Detective to Task but
has decided to do so in the way the best satires used to be: with complete
seriousness.
The great parodies I've watched in
my lifetime are Mel Brooks films from the early 1970s (Blazing Saddles,
Young Frankenstein) much of Monty Python's work and the early ZAZ films
such as Airplane and Top Secret. The reason they were all
extraordinarily funny (and the reason so many of their predecessor were
lacking) is because all of the actors delivering the dialogue believed that
they were in a serious drama. Only the viewer knew differently. The closest
thing I've seen to it in my lifetime was when this played out on The X-Files
under the writing of Vince Gilligan and Darin Morgan. Both of them wrote
brilliant satires not because they thought the show was beneath them but
because they acknowledged that there were certain things about them that were
ridiculous. Conrad's essentially doing the same thing with DTF St. Louis.
Consider the early encounter
between Carol and Clark when Carol asks Clark what his deepest fantasy is. He
tells her "I want to go about your day…while you sit on my face."
Both Bateman's delivery and Cardellini's reaction are completely serious and so
when we see it play out they're still taking it seriously.
Then there's a sequence where
Homer looks up the profiles Floyd is encountering online and learns that one of
them is Tiger Tiger. He learns that Tiger Tiger is a fake profile designed by Clark.
He goes back into the interrogation room and starts calling Clark Tiger, first
subtly and then with more force. Then he tells Clark that he is using the
profile Tiger Tiger to trick Floyd and then explains exactly how he did it.
Then he goes and interviews a witness and then comes back in and tells Clark
word for word pretty much what he did in the previous interrogation in a
complete deadpan delivery that would do Frank Drebin proud. Then he explains
the entire makeup of why the case is solid a third time to Inspector
Plumb.
This is done with such solemnity
and seriousness you can't help but be reminded of every time you watched True
Detective and every character talked about certain details with such metaphysical
terms that the viewer was sure that there had to be something supernatural
going on. (Remember Floyd was found with a Playgirl in front of him posed and
with the face of a magazine scratched out. Maybe the Yellow King had something
to do with it.) But in DTF it's done with such incredible deadpan by all
the characters involved that you know it has to be a satire. Conrad remembers
that old slogan: "Its Not TV. Its HBO" and seems to be using every
trick in the book to remind as at times how pretentious the network treated so
many of its own offerings over the years. But he's not doing it with the savage
scalpel that we get from those such as Armando Ianucci but rather the gentle
pokes that I remember with Gilligan when Mulder and Scully were telling each
other how an investigation into Chaney, Texas ended with Mulder putting a stake
through the heart of a teenager who was wearing fake fangs.
Now if you don't want to look for
these kinds of meta layers you don't have to; I may be like every TV fan trying
to see some kind of layers into the plot that isn't there. But taken on its own
merits DTF St. Louis is something I haven't seen on HBO, or for that
matter any cable or streaming service in a very long time. It’s a TV series that really isn't interested
in raising awareness or raising deep philosophical questions. It just wants to
have fun and entertain its audience. It does so, I should add, without being
pretentious or insulting its audience's intelligence either. And the fact that
we're seeing a lot of flabby people engaging in bizarre sexual activity within
weeks of the return of Euphoria – which is the definition of the kind of
pretentious, self-awareness that Conrad pretty much rejects in his show – is an
irony that will be lost on Euphoria's fan but which is not lost on me
and is appreciated.
HBO's about go back into its usual
dark pretentious mode very soon, first with the long-awaited return of Euphoria
and then with the much anticipated (though probably less so then with
Season 2) ditto of House of The Dragon. As someone who finds both those shows all the
worst aspects of HBO in the last decade DTF St. Louis is a refreshing
Watermelon Breeze of an alternative.
My score: 4.25 stars.
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