This article contains spoilers.
Middle-age malaise, an affair, a mysterious death … at first glance, the HBO series “DTF St. Louis” seems to be another show about the most clichéd of suburban crimes of passion. Clark Forrest, a local weatherman (played by Jason Bateman), befriends Floyd (David Harbour), a kind American Sign Language interpreter. The two men, unsatisfied in their sex lives, download a hookup app and Clark has an affair with Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini). Floyd ends up dead under mysterious circumstances.
The mystery is full of red herrings — Clark as the cuckolding friend with a romantic motive, Carol as the unlikable wife with a financial motive — but the series, which ended with Sunday’s finale, unpacks a more nuanced and significantly more interesting relationship between its male leads.
Instead of well-worn tropes, “DTF” gives viewers a tender exploration of the novel ways that straight-ish men can be vulnerable and intimate with one another, and how loneliness and desire can upend traditional labels of sexuality.
At first it seems like Clark and Floyd have the usual kind of friendship between straight middle-aged dudes. They hit the gym together. They open up about their sexual frustrations with their wives. Soon they awkwardly inch toward vulnerability, all while the show plays with the homoerotic undertones of the male friendship as a source of comedy.
In a silly series of gym scenes, Floyd and Clark brace each other as they stretch, Floyd spotting Clark from behind. The scenes are a play on the hypermasculine gym bro culture, especially given that Floyd is recounting how he kissed a man he met on the DTF app. (The kiss was just to be polite, Floyd says, having assumed he would be meeting a woman.)
Bateman’s performances in these scenes are illuminating; his expression is of quiet surprise, and a knee-jerk homophobic response seems to be brewing just beneath the surface. But Floyd’s experience with another man leads him to re-evaluate the terms of his loneliness, and how much sex or orientation matters to a man so desperate for connection. Is Floyd closeted? Harbour’s performance is so soft and earnest that Floyd’s actual sexual orientation is left in question to the audience as well as to other characters in the series.
But Floyd’s willingness to explore dating men seems to also create a safe space for Clark to consider that maybe their friendship is something between platonic and romantic — a more nuanced kind of love that, culturally, is not as acceptable for straight men to explore.
A funny ongoing bit about Floyd’s anatomical anomaly — a slanted penis, the result of a mysterious accident that Floyd keeps trying to tell Clark about in the most drawn-out, roundabout story — is another way the show gestures toward male sexual vulnerability. The story is less about the genital accident itself and more about Floyd’s character and ambitions, and the rift in his marriage. Just sharing it with Clark is its own special form of intimacy.
So much of the show makes fun of how these bored, lonely suburbanites seduce one another and define for themselves what’s erotic. There are the absurd ways that Carol and Clark role play in what they choose to call “dream meetings”: hotel meet-ups where they fulfill each other’s sexual fantasies. Carol sits on Clark’s face — underwear on — while completing banal tasks on her phone. Clark acts like a sex robot, so a rear shot of Carol’s naked body riding his is awkwardly framed by his mechanical “robot” arms.
The sweetest, most heart-wrenching parts of this quirky, decidedly unsexy show are when Clark and Floyd are alone chatting. They are nice to each other, openly affectionate and loving. There’s always the hovering question of their sexuality, as embodied by Detective Homer (a delightfully square Richard Jenkins), who leads the investigation into Floyd’s death and is at every turn utterly baffled by the straight-but-also-real-gay nature of Clark and Floyd’s relationship.
In the finale, there’s a flashback to when Clark and Floyd meet one morning at a local pool house. They dance in their underwear, complimenting each other’s bodies. The scene is not erotic in the typical sense but there is a fascinating, prolonged kind of flirtation that blooms in the gray area between the loneliness of these two men. They get so close to a consummation but pull back at the last minute, and the effect is devastating.
Not just devastating because it ends in a suicide, but because of how the show gives into clichés that it largely avoided. Floyd is reduced to the self-hating, gay-coded character whose sexual exploration concludes with death. And Clark is the male character who grew too close to his friend in a way that threatened his heterosexuality, so he ultimately finds his life upended as well.
For all of the ways the show literally and figuratively says sex and desire are complicated, that there is no “normal,” that one’s feelings for another can be too “complex” for labels — at the end it settles for the cynical narrative that men who dare to be vulnerable with one another are doomed.
Maya Phillips is an arts and culture critic for The Times.
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