It’s been a rough year for David Harbour, who had to watch his ex-wife Lily Allen dish the dirt on their failed marriage on her latest album and then say farewell to the show that made him famous, Stranger Things.
But third time proves a charm as he stars in DTF St Louis (Sky/Now TV), an enjoyably offbeat comedy/drama/thriller in which he plays a sign-language interpreter on a US television station in Missouri who becomes enmeshed in a murder mystery involving a naked corpse, an icky dating website and Indiana Jones-themed pornography. Did we mention his manhood is literally out of shape or that his wife is having an affair with his skeevy best pal (Jason Bateman)?
Harbour’s Floyd is an everyman deep in a midlife slump, while Bateman’s Clark is an atrocious urbanista whose middle-class villainy is signalled by the fact that he cycles everywhere on a specialist bicycle. He is also obsessed with a casual hook-up site – DTF St Louis – where he believes he can have string-free fun outside his marriage.
Clark is Floyd’s best friend and also his work colleague. He presents the nightly weather broadcast while Floyd does the sign language. As a bonus, he is soon sleeping with Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), about whom Floyd has developed a sexual blockage after an image of her dressed as a baseball umpire is seared into his brain.
DTF St Louis is part of a trend of elevated quirkiness that has become quietly voguish in US television. See also Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and his Emma Stone collaboration, The Curse, and John Wilson’s How To – an HBO documentary series so unhinged it is hard to work out if it is fact, fiction, or lives in some dimension where the distinction is meaningless.
DTF St Louis has the same sense of existing in a parallel reality, subtly disconnected from our own, and mileage may vary. It does pick up in the second half after that body is discovered. Here it settles into a largely conventional procedural, in which Richard Jenkins plays a veteran detective who believes he has the case settled after identifying what he regards as a thread of toxicity in the friendship between Floyd and Clark. Which is fair enough considering Clark is sleeping with Floyd’s wife.
Harbour is fantastic as a sad sack who is starting to wonder if it’s even worth getting out of bed in the morning. Bateman, for his part, once again excels as a low-key, sleazy “nice guy” – he’s essentially riffing on the character he played nearly two decades ago in Juno.
The leads are great and have a sour anti-chemistry, as male friendship sometimes does. That said, DTF St Louis comes with a health warning. It casts a cynical eye on suburban life and on the humiliations of middle age. So much so that some viewers may feel that the show is laughing up its sleeves at them: the Gen X Edgelord vibes are strong. But it is refreshingly its own thing, and once it calms down a bit, the central whodunit is compelling.
