Suburbia Starts Coming Apart

Read Time:7 Minute, 41 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
DTF St. Louis
–

Genre: Drama, Comedy, Mystery
Year: 2026
Runtime: 7 episodes / Approx. 5h 50m
Creator: Steven Conrad
Writer: Steven Conrad
Director: Steven Conrad
Cast: Jason Bateman, David Harbour, Linda Cardellini, Richard Jenkins, Joy Sunday, Arlan Ruf, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Perfetti
Where to Watch: available to own on DVD on October 13, 2026; pre-order your copy here: www.amazon.com; now available digitally

RAVING REVIEW: The murder in DTF ST. LOUIS honestly feels like a trick to get us through the door. Steven Conrad gives us a dead body, two detectives, shifting timelines, unreliable accounts of what happened, and plenty of questions about how everything went wrong, but solving the case gradually becomes less important than understanding why these people were vulnerable to blowing up their lives in the first place.

That distinction turns another familiar HBO murder mystery into something far stranger. DTF ST. LOUIS is funny, uncomfortable, sad, sexually awkward, occasionally even surreal, and deeply interested in people who reach middle age only to discover adulthood never delivered the certainty they assumed would arrive.

Jason Bateman plays Clark Forrest, a television weatherman whose seemingly successful life hides growing dissatisfaction with almost everything beneath it. David Harbour is Floyd Smernitch, a family man who seems less angry with his circumstances than quietly defeated by them. And Linda Cardellini plays Floyd’s wife, Carol, whose restlessness makes her far more complicated than the neglected-spouse role she initially seems positioned to occupy.

Their problems all slam into each other after Clark and Floyd become friends. Both men are unhappy in their marriages, and Clark introduces Floyd to DTF St. Louis, a discreet dating app intended for married people looking outside their relationships. What Clark presents as an escape from routine opens a door that none of them have the emotional maturity to close again.

Conrad has little interest in rushing toward the expected affair, confrontation, murder, investigation structure. He lets conversations wander, plants details whose importance isn't immediately apparent, repeats strange phrases and behaviors, and allows everyday situations to become uncomfortable simply because nobody involved seems capable of responding like a normal person.

Harbour is especially good at finding the person underneath all the eccentricity. Floyd could easily become a pathetic punchline, particularly once the series begins revealing increasingly intimate information about his marriage, his body, and his insecurities. Harbour instead makes his vulnerability almost painfully sincere, giving Floyd enough warmth that his failures don't erase the basic decency underneath them.

Floyd and Clark's friendship becomes one of the series' strongest parts because it refuses to fit the usual television version of male friendship. These two men are desperate for someone who understands their disappointment, yet neither has been particularly well equipped to admit how lonely he actually is. Their conversations can turn ridiculous without making that connection feel like a joke.

Clark has the dry delivery, uncomfortable confidence, and questionable decision-making Bateman can practically play out in his sleep, but something increasingly sad lies beneath the sarcasm. Clark knows how to present himself as the person who has everything figured out even while making decisions that suggest precisely the opposite.

Cardellini has an even harder balance to keep in her role as Carol because the series keeps changing what we understand about her. She can be funny, frustrated, affectionate, manipulative, impulsive, and impossible to really trust without any of those qualities canceling out the others. Giving Carol her own desires rather than reducing her to the woman caught between two men is essential to keeping the love triangle from becoming much uglier than it already is.

Nobody gets to sit in that superior moral position. Floyd can be sympathetic while making terrible choices, Clark can genuinely care about his friend while betraying him, and Carol's dissatisfaction doesn't automatically make everything she does defensible. DTF ST. LOUIS is more interested in how people justify their behavior than in casting them as heroes and villains.

The nonlinear structure reinforces that idea because we keep receiving information after we've already formed an opinion. The series moves between the events leading to the death and the investigation afterward, allowing new details to reshape earlier moments without turning every episode into another mechanical twist. Sometimes the important revelation isn't what happened but why someone chose to describe it differently.

Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday provide the investigative side through Donoghue Homer and Jodie Plumb, an intentionally mismatched pair trying to make sense of people who aren't especially interested in making sense themselves. Jenkins is particularly suited to Conrad's unique dialogue, delivering bizarre observations with such complete seriousness that the line between comedy and philosophy occasionally disappears.

Homer and Plumb have their moments, and the shifting accounts give them plenty to untangle. At times, returning to the procedural feels like leaving the more interesting show happening between Clark, Floyd, and Carol. The central relationships are strong enough that the murder sometimes feels less like the story and more like an elaborate framing device.

Seven episodes also give Conrad room to indulge himself, sometimes more than he needs to. DTF ST. LOUIS deliberately moves slowly, but deliberate and essential aren't always the same thing. A handful of scenes linger past the point where their emotional or comedic purpose has landed, while some recurring oddities feel increasingly aware of how odd they are. Conrad understands that loneliness isn't always expressed through somebody sitting alone in a dark room; sometimes it looks like two middle-aged men enthusiastically embracing an absurd new friendship because neither realized how badly he needed one.

This isn't some glamorous infidelity involving impossibly wealthy people disappearing into luxury hotels. DTF ST. LOUIS takes place among local television, family gatherings, bicycle rides, awkward social gatherings, aging bodies, everyday suburban life, and people trying desperately to inject excitement into lives that aren't objectively terrible enough to justify how trapped they feel. That's part of what makes the humor sting. Some external tragedy hasn't destroyed Clark, Floyd, and Carol. They've simply accumulated disappointments, compromises, resentments, and abandoned expectations until doing something reckless starts looking more appealing than continuing exactly as they are.

The sexual material follows that same approach. Despite the title, the series isn't particularly interested in making any of this look glamorous. Sex becomes another place where insecurity, ego, embarrassment, curiosity, loneliness, and the desire to feel wanted collide, often producing funnier situations because everyone is taking them so seriously.

Conrad also resists turning middle-aged dissatisfaction into an excuse for his characters. Feeling ignored doesn't make betrayal harmless, loneliness doesn't erase selfishness, and wanting another chance at happiness doesn't prevent someone else from getting hurt. The series can understand why people behave badly without pretending understanding and forgiveness are the same thing.

By the time DTF ST. LOUIS reaches its final stretch, the question hanging over everything has expanded beyond who died and how. The question becomes how three adults who were desperate to feel alive managed to confuse escape with happiness, and how much damage people can justify while convincing themselves they're finally being honest.

DTF ST. LOUIS occasionally tests the patience it demands, and its investigative side never becomes as compelling as the relationships surrounding it. Those imperfections are easier to accept because there's personality behind nearly every decision. In a television landscape filled with shows engineered to be consumed and immediately replaced by the next one, this oddball limited series is hard to shake.

What begins with sex, infidelity, and a body ultimately becomes something sadder and more compassionate about friendship, aging, and the terrifying realization that becoming an adult doesn't mean anyone ever teaches you how to be one. DTF ST. LOUIS is messy because its characters are messy, and for most of its seven episodes, that's exactly why it works.

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[photo courtesy of WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY HOME ENTERTAINMENT, HBO]

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