Last October, Lily Allen released a jaw-dropping album about the sexual politics of her marriage to actor David Harbour. It was a musical assassination – reportedly written in the wake of her personal sleuthing into his long-term infidelities via the dating app Raya. Therefore the timing of DTF St Louis (Monday 2 March, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), in which Harbour plays a man in a stagnant marriage who downloads a hook-up app to enjoy some extramarital boom boom, is juicy. For everyone except his publicist.
From the trailer, this was a hard-to-read show. Was it a dark comedy, a bedroom farce, a police procedural? The answer turns out to be yes, to all of those things. I also wondered whether it might be a televisual return to the erotic thrillers of the 90s. The answer to that one is no, although it’s a show with sex on the brain.
Everyone knows dating apps are hell, so it’s perverse that we’re all on them now, even married people. They can be a frictionless way to seek out an affair, which is what Harbour’s character, a sign language interpreter called Floyd, does. He’s vigorously assisted by his best friend Clark, played by Jason Bateman, a similarly frustrated, middle-aged weatherman. There’s obviously been a cold front in the Missouri area – but things are heating up!
Actually, they’re not. Within 25 minutes, Harbour is dead, slumped against the wall of the “Kevin Kline Community Pool” with a defaced, Indiana Jones-themed Playgirl centrefold at his side, and a lethal can of Bloody Mary. The seven episodes of this HBO miniseries piece together the puzzlebox in classic whodunnit style. Clark is first implicated, but question marks remain over Floyd’s minx of a wife, Carol. I kept shouting at the screen that “it has to be Lily Allen!” but apparently her alibi is watertight. She was in the West End at the time.
Confidently written and directed by Steven Conrad, it’s beautifully shot and modern. The murder case’s two investigative leads, Homer and Plumb, are engagingly played by Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday, a bald, white boomer and beautiful, young, Black woman, respectively. They clash from the off – she is special crimes, he is a county sheriff’s office detective, with jurisdiction.
Reluctantly working together, it’s Plumb who educates Homer in niche terms such as sex-positive dating, and the rococo psychology of how people get off nowadays. The initialisms a bewildered Jenkins scrawls in his otherwise blank notebook, such as AP for “ass play”, are hilarious. But hey, who hasn’t googled an outre acronym they’ve seen on the internet? Humiliating, isn’t it?
The show is less horny, more ennui laden. There are laughs – dark, sad laughs. To help make ends meet (and despite knowing nothing about baseball), Carol (Linda Cardellini) has been umpiring Little League games in her spare time. The huge padded “ump gear” she wears around the house has murdered Floyd’s libido. “It’s the puffy chest guard and mask. That’s puffy too,” he laments to Clark. The two men whisper their experiences with the fictional dating app in clandestine conversations, as if planning a jail break. If you’ve ever wanted to see the urbane Bateman, host of the brilliant Smartless podcast, being pegged in a hotel room, get stuck in.
Pacing and plot points are idiosyncratic. Floyd’s weight gain is one. The camera frames his belly, which is out-out. He has Peyronie’s disease, which has grotesquely curved his penis, another mystery teased out over the series. Yet Floyd is pure of spirit; the only riding he gets is the T-shirt riding over his stomach, even in death. We see him retrospectively, working as a deaf interpreter at hip-hop shows, throwing himself into expressive choreography with amazing grace, while scenes of him teaching ASL to his friend are touching. One sees why Harbour took the job, but it’s still an admirably un-vain performance.
I’m increasingly drawn into the four episodes I’ve seen. Middle-aged marriage malaise is a familiar theme, yet DTF runs it into weird places, with unpredictable twists, solid detective thrills, suburban boredom and, er, bone-dry humour. Although its main takeaway seems to be that if you use dating apps, you will be immediately murdered by a swimming pool. And that’s if you get off lightly.
