Missed Connections: Communication and Its Failures in DTF St. Louis

The final episode of DTF St. Louis is titled “No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street.” It’s a thesis statement for the show, a seven-episode tragicomedy that dwells mostly in the well-worn ‘white suburban life is more complicated than it looks’ genre. I won’t claim that DTF St. Louis is much more than that, but it is a show that digs incredibly deep in pursuit of intimacy, how much we crave human connection, and how difficult it is to find.

Here’s the basic plot. Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), an ASL interpreter, is found half-dressed and dead at a local pool. Floyd had an account on “DTF St. Louis,” a dating app that’s meant to echo Ashley Madison¹, and had a date set up for that night. The canned Bloody Mary found at his side contained a lethal dose of Amphezyne, a prescription medication that can stimulate an erection or stop a heart, depending on how much the patient takes. The main suspects are his wife Carol, played by the always-note-perfect Linda Cardellini, and his best friend Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), a weatherman at one of the local TV stations. The two police officers assigned to the case try to figure out exactly what happened to Floyd, and the twists and turns of the investigation—alternating with flashbacks to Clark, Carol and Floyd’s life leading up to the presumed murder—give shape to the series.

The show treats the mystery as perhaps a bit larger than it actually is; I had a pretty good idea of what happened to Floyd pretty early on, and by the time the series ended the details were less of a surprise and more of an inevitability. But DTF St. Louis is more focused on Floyd’s last months than Floyd’s last moments. The show wants to talk about how we connect, and where those connections fail. It wants to talk about love, and how it can strengthen us, and fail us. I’m still not sure I really enjoyed the show, but I don’t regret watching it.

Before I dig into the meat of things, which will be spoilers all the way down, I want to take a minute to talk about how the show handles Floyd’s career. While there is a little bit of idealism toward the work Floyd does, the show mostly treats ASL as just another form of communication, and ASL interpretation as a job that gets too little credit and not enough money (which is true). There is a moment where Floyd helps a disabled teenager which skirts the edge of inspiration porn, but I appreciated that they gave the teenager a few moments to be not just a Person In Need, but someone with a real personality and real goals.

Let’s get into those spoilers now.

CW for discussion of suicide.

The story snaps between past and present, and for a good amount of the series both the detectives and viewers are unsure of what happened to Floyd. Floyd and Clark bond over the way their marriages have lost not just spark, but sex; Carol and Clark were having an affair, meeting up at a local chain hotel for afternoon trysts next to the pool. Carol had talked Clark into paying for a life insurance policy, kept in a secretly rented post office box, as part of a complicated web of conscious subterfuge that makes perfect sense to the characters and is flat-out absurd to an outsider. (I caught myself saying “what the fuck are you all doing” to the screen at least once.) Carol spends a lot of time in the show as the prime suspect: she pursued the affair with Clark, she was frustrated with her husband and desperate for money, she is difficult and hostile with the investigators. It’s only as the series continues that we not only understand Carol’s desperation, but also her legitimate frustrations and the depths of her love.²

Clark is at the near-top of his professional career, with billboards showing his friendly face all over the city, with a beautiful wife and two lovely daughters. On paper, it’s everything he should want. In practice, even in the earliest flashbacks we can see the disquiet bubbling under his skin. It’s not enough, what he has. It’s not right, what he has. He wants something more, or just something else, and at first he thinks Carol—beautiful, smart Carol, who drinks the same Go-Getter smoothie he loves—might be enough.

But she’s not.

Clark rejects his current life in the most destructive ways imaginable. He enjoys fucking Carol³, but in the end, the pleasure they take in each other pales in comparison to the love he feels for Floyd. He and Carol bring Floyd into the bedroom, a voyeur behind the closet door in their motel room. But in this case, it’s not enough for Floyd. He wants to be more than the one watching: he wants to be seen again, desired again. And neither Carol nor Clark can quite be what he needs. Clark is so in love with Floyd it’s almost blinding. Clark doesn’t know what framework to put Floyd in: he’s not a brother, not a sexual partner. He offers financial support, emotional support, learns sign language like his life and future depends on it.

After Floyd dies, Clark and his lawyer argue constantly about what Clark should disclose; his self-preservation instincts consistently crumble in the face of his desire to protect Floyd’s remaining reputation, and to save Floyd’s wife and stepson from any continued harm. Jason Bateman is doing really phenomenal work here, struggling with his own feelings both in the flashback and in the current timeline, mentally scrambling as circumstances change. His likeable-but-not-trustable affect is put to perfect use here, and the camera makes the most of every line on his face. Bateman makes us believe that Clark would go to a completely different city and find a queer-friendly Denny’s in hopes of finding a man willing to get a boner in front of his friend. (He finds someone, played with weaselly charm by Abbott Elementary’s Chris Perfetti, but the game collapses when Perfetti decides that Floyd’s too much of an overweight sad sack to get a hard-on over.⁴) 

(If anyone had introduced any of these people to the word ‘queerplatonic’ the show might be one episode long with a happy ending. But I digress.)

The teenager I mentioned earlier is a Deafblind student who is headed for his prom and was dropped off on the wrong side of the hotel holding the event; Floyd realizes he’s headed straight for the pool and bolts out of the hotel room, throwing the whole game he, Clark and Carol are playing right out the window, to make sure the kid stays safe and dry. The young man was determined to walk into prom by himself; like any teenager, he’s a little self-conscious and wants to be independent. Floyd reassures him and gets him to the right door.

One of the key themes in DTF St. Louis is communication, and where it fails. Floyd manages to get on the level of a teenager he’s just met, a young Black man with disabilities he doesn’t have. But he struggles to connect with his stepson, and his marriage has been falling apart for months, if not years. Carol and Clark’s affair starts with a lie and ends with a truth that hurts them both: Carol doesn’t want to leave her husband, but she’s lost all sexual compatibility with him. Floyd is kind and loving and altruistic, but there’s a childishness to him at times, and he’s unwilling to hear Carol when she’s honest about their financial situation. He’s also losing himself more as every day passes. At the end of the show, Floyd is the one who drugs his own Bloody Mary, the despair that has dogged his steps from the beginning finally taking over. Floyd was loved, loved dearly, but sometimes love isn’t enough.⁵

In the final scenes, Floyd signs I love you to his stepson, but Richard misinterprets the sign as ‘rock on.’ (If you’re holding up your hand at home and trying to figure it out, the devil horns are slightly different.) Even Floyd’s last words are a miscommunication.

ASL is used really interestingly here. There’s a gimmicky aspect to it for sure, but it’s really striking that Clark is the only person in Floyd’s life who throws himself into learning sign language. They’re two little boys playing games in the backyard that only they understand; they’re two grown men who can’t articulate what they want, and on the rare occasions they manage it, it falls apart in their hands.

In contrast to this over-complicated web of relationships, DTF St. Louis introduces us to two detectives investigating the case, ably played by Joy Sunday and Richard Jenkins⁶. They clash immediately over jurisdiction, but resign themselves to working together, and over the course of the series their prickly mistrust turns to reluctant collaboration, and then genuine affection. Sunday’s Jodie Plumb is matter-of-fact about sexuality and clear-eyed about human foibles; Jenkins’s Donoghue Homer (a fantastic name, by the way) is dogged and boggled by the sexual shenanigans around him, but he is thoughtful and down-to-earth. They are capable of making the connections that our leads struggle with, both with their witnesses and with each other.⁷

They end the series as friends, drinking together and talking through the case. “You’re so normal you’re weird,” Plumb teases her partner, when she’s goaded him into confessing his rather tame sexual proclivities. But they are both happy in their lives, clear about what they want. It’s easier to be vulnerable when you’re in a position of security.

Floyd never got to that. Carol and Clark might not. But as Carol picks up her life yet again and Clark wanders around his empty house, it’s hard not to hope they’ll get there.

This Hollywood Reporter interview contains some fun background about the show, and at least reassured me that I was picking up on some things that were intentional on screen.

(It occurs to me that this is the third time, at least, I’ve written up death by suicide on this website. I don’t know what that means or if it means anything at all, but once again in the US and Canada, call 988 for help at any time. For queer-specific mental health support, in the US you can contact The Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386.)

1. They’re still around! I wonder if most of the users are still men. ↩︎
2. The show uses the ‘bitch wife’ stereotype to its full advantage: countless series, most notably Breaking Bad, tried to portray women as anything other than perfect only to find them hated by their audience. DTF St. Louis goes on the assumption that the viewer will be disinclined to trust the female lead and lets you see her at her absolute worst before filling the rest of the picture in. But some of our last images of Carol are her as a loving mother, willing to do anything to support her son, and her integrity is key to the solution of the mystery. ↩︎
3. Again, Linda Cardellini. ↩︎
4. This show is fucking weird about David Harbour’s size. He gained weight for this role, and the show does suggest that Floyd’s depression is as much of a turn-off as his body, but those hints aren’t enough for the way that Harbour’s overall look is treated. And sure, the show takes place in a weird, elevated reality, but I still thought it was pretty fucking odd that no one uttered the word “bear.” Even with so much of DTF St. Louis being deliberately off-kilter, it feels unnecessary.  ↩︎
5. A mystery the show leaves open is how much Floyd’s self-sacrificing tendencies come after the injury that changes both his and Carol’s lives. We get a hint of who he used to be, but it’s just a hint. ↩︎
6. Really, the casting and performances in this show are top notch. Peter Sarsgaard, who I haven’t even gotten to, plays a gentle, eccentric queer man who frequents DTF St. Louis and runs a roller rink. Sarsgaard and Jenkins play off each other beautifully. Everyone is wholly throwing themselves into the material, no matter how goofy the scene. ↩︎
7. IDK what it says that the cops are the communicators here, either. I think they’re just a convenient outside perspective. ↩︎