The following story contains spoilers through the end of DTF St. Louis.
“NO ONE’S NORMAL. It just looks like that from across the street.”
In HBO’s DTF St. Louis, that sentiment is expressed by several characters, so it’s only fitting that the series finale takes the phrase as its title. Across seven episodes, the notion of normalcy in suburban St. Louis has been flipped on its axis as our three leads—played by Jason Bateman, David Harbour, and Linda Cardellini; all excellent—grapple with middle-age malaise, desire, and vulnerability. There’s also the small matter of Harbour’s ASL interpreter, Floyd Smernitch, found dead outside a community swimming pool, seemingly poisoned with a fatal dose of Amphezyne in a canned Bloody Mary.
But as it happens, DTF St. Louis turns out to be less of a whodunnit than a why-do-it. When the show’s nonlinear series of events brings us back to the night of Floyd’s death, his weatherman bestie, Clark Forrest (Bateman), is doing all he can to cheer his friend up after coming up empty on the Ashley Madison–esque hookup app, DTF. One thing leads to another, and the two men strip down to their tighty whities, comparing and complimenting the other’s body before dancing together. It’s intimate more than strictly sexual—the kind of bond many men might go their whole lives without experiencing. Out of context, however, it’s something Floyd’s stepson, Richard, happens upon, and reacts to with disgust. Floyd sees Richard’s reaction and, in turn, downs the remainder of his Amphezyne-laced cocktail. It’s a devastating end to a journey marked by pain, insecurity, and confusion.
“Floyd looks through that pane of glass in his underwear, and he’s doing something that isn’t that strange, honestly. You would understand if you were 45 and lonely,” DTF St. Louis creator Steven Conrad tells Men’s Health. “But Richard is 12, and when Floyd sees him through the glass, he feels that he’s made Richard’s life less sound, more confused, and very lonely. In his mind, he’s made Richard think this man he lives with is a person he can’t understand.”
That tension between intimacy and shame is what makes DTF St. Louis so haunting long after the mystery is resolved. Following the finale, Men’s Health spoke with Conrad about Floyd’s tragic final moments, the show’s meditation on male vulnerability, and whether the answer is for men to give pickleball a shot.
MEN’S HEALTH: One of the biggest things that drew me to DTF St. Louis was how well it captures the loneliness and unease that can lurk beneath the surface of suburban life—something Blue Velvet captured so brilliantly 40 years ago. How do you think the dark side of suburbia has evolved, and what felt specific to this moment?
STEVEN CONRAD: There’s this suburban weight that exists in this world that I think is probably expectational. If you live here, you probably have contentedness. You probably have your bills paid. There’s a normalcy to the month-to-month surprises that you’re on top of, versus renting or something. I also know none of that’s true—there’s no such thing as being in the black. It just doesn’t happen today.
I thought it was important to marry that with being middle-aged, because there’s something tense about that time of life, too. You have to make peace with your possibilities and, in Floyd’s instance, his clothes don’t even fit anymore. He’s told himself it would be a bad idea to get bigger clothes because that would just mean a bigger Floyd later. The best thing he can do is just say this is the summer he’s going to lose some weight. That’s a tough deal to make with yourself, because you’re challenging yourself to be deprived of something, and to change something that might not be easy to suspend. Then you feel worse, and like you let yourself down.
It’s not a coincidence that he’s haunted by this former version of himself in Playgirl, where anything was possible for that Floyd. It’s not true anymore for this Floyd. There was something about the suburbs that made me feel like you can make a bad mistake out there by thinking someone’s gentle or normal, only to find out there’s darkness there as deep as any city anywhere.
MH: The DTF app is reminiscent of something like Ashley Madison. Were there any real-world stories or experiences that helped shape the story for you?
SC: I remember in 2018 having this promise that there would be consequence-less hookups that don’t have resonating connections to your life. I remember people my age feeling like they might explore that. It just seemed like you were bound to find out that there’s no such thing as consequence-less intimacy. One way or another, you’ll carry something with you and you’ll be slightly changed from it. Keeping secrets… everybody has to do it. Privacy is an imperative feature of grown-up life.
Even when you’re little, sharing rooms with your brothers and living a life that doesn’t have any privacy. If you happen to be Catholic and you think God’s watching you all the time, that’s a weird deprivation of your privacy, too. You feel like you’re never really alone. Then you get a little grown up, you shake off those ways of thinking about things. But then you feel like, OK, do I have secrets? Do I have kinks? Do I have passions?
It’s a bad idea. That Ashley Madison thing, it seemed like it could get out of hand really fast. So, I thought I’ll set [DTF St. Louis] in 2018, and this can be the instigating idea. It’ll be a fun summer, only to find out that this series of events happens that is not easy to understand. There are complexities to all of this that seem simple. There’s pain involved where you thought there was going to be pleasure—even just the idea of Floyd getting sad because no one seems interested in wanting to connect to him.
MH: Despite all the twists and turns, I found the relationship between Clark and Floyd genuinely endearing. What’s the biggest barrier that keeps most men from being that vulnerable with one another?
SC: I think it’s as simple as there isn’t a way to have fun together. Like, what do we do that is fun, that isn’t sex? What I’m saying is sex… that’s grown up fun. There are fewer and fewer things you can do that are fun that are not sex. Like sex, it just absorbs all of that need.
The road I was going down just a minute ago is that you need someone to tell your secrets to. You need someone to tell the kind of joke that you wouldn’t tell among a group of strangers. I think what Clark and Floyd are experiencing is that there aren’t mechanisms to discover fun together that seem normal at all to men that age. Like, what are they going to do? The things we could have done that we didn’t do that were, like, pickleball.
MH: A fantasy football league.
SC: Yeah, but I mean, how fun is that, really? [Laughs] There’s a ceiling, and that ceiling, it’s real short. Going on DTF, exploring that together, it just seemed like good, clean fun. It’s stupid because it’s not good and it’s not clean, and it doesn’t turn out to be very fun, either. But the need to have a friend overwhelms the opportunities to have friends. So you force it and then maybe confuse it.
Clark has Carol when he really needs Floyd, and the sexual life he has with Carol starts to create these resonating confusions in his world. But the pure thing he really needed was intimacy with another human being to take some of the edge off of life. You go out with a friend to a bar and you have two beers and you go home. Like, that’s what you need. But you need it so bad that you have sex, and then you regret it. They dive too deeply into this friendship out of the happiness that they found. I don’t know what the answer is, except to say that you know you need something that you have fewer and fewer opportunities to really get anymore.
MH: Something else I found really affecting is how Richard seems to be grappling with some of the same issues around vulnerability as the adult men in the show. He’s lashing out a lot. Do you think it’s easier or harder for younger generations to be open with their feelings, or are the obstacles just taking different forms?
SC: Well, raising kids, you have to confront this idea that you’re going to live with fear forever: The fear of them out in the world, the fear of them around other people, the fear of them driving. It’s an onboard feature forever, once you have kids and your instinct is to try to make life for them a little more safe and sound.
Floyd’s purpose, as we come to know him, could be reduced to making Richard’s life a little more safe and sound. He almost did it, and it might have been the accomplishment of his life. You know, it’s funny, in that Playgirl centerfold, we explored all of his pictures in a fun way. But one thing we never got around to finding a home for is he did a little Q&A in his centerfold, and they asked what he wanted to be in life. His answer was, “important to someone.”
He almost did that with Richard, except for this mistake of the recklessness of putting grown-up things in front of him to be discovered. It’s a punishing end to a really hard phase of life for him. He almost got there, and it was playing with matches, essentially, that allowed for this little fire to happen that he didn’t even notice was in the environment of his loved ones.
MH: The reveal that Floyd ultimately took his own life really recontextualizes so much of the show. What did you want the audience to take away from that revelation, both in terms of his character and the larger emotional world of the story?
SC: The tenderness that a person needs in order just to cope, right? Tenderness—we don’t always deserve it. Floyd’s a wonderful person, but you’d be hard-pressed to say he deserves tenderness from Carol right now, because he’s making some decisions that have made her life more difficult than it already was. Carol has drives like anybody else, but her primary drive is to keep Richard safe and sound. Floyd could have gotten through this situation if there was sustained tenderness in his life, but it wasn’t there, and Clark wasn’t the person to give it to him.
Clark was only capable of so much, and he tried. He really tried all the way through that pool house to be comprehensively tender and giving to Floyd, and he’s not the person. I would love for audiences to think about that grown-up C’s theme from the first time we meet Floyd, and he says he doesn’t want Richard to get grown-up C’s. Grown-up C’s means you haven’t made friendships that allow you to demonstrate what’s most valuable about you. I would love for anybody who experiences heaviness from the show to say, “Are giving that to each other?”
MH: That’s a wonderful sentiment. The show had some moments of real levity, too, so to switch gears for a second, something I was dying to talk to you about are all the scenes at the police station. The environment was so surreal—it felt like the Harkonnen’s home world in Dune [laughs]. What inspired that look?
SC: [Laughs] What inspired it was, if you turn on your TV and you change your channel, every other channel, there’s a police station and they all look the same. I don’t want someone to feel like they’ve been exactly here before.
I want the consequences to feel personal to DTF St. Louis. I want it to feel specific and private to the audience, so that meant creating a new energy and a new heft for that department. But, it turns out, if you look up pictures of the St. Louis police department, it looks a lot like the one we created.
MH: That’s horrifying.
SC: No, I know. I found it in the last place I would look; The real place looks like our thing. But I don’t know why we do stuff like that [laughs]. What else can we do here besides having all the desks facing each other?
MH: It’s such a memorable detail. I also wanted to talk about Richard Jenkins, whose deadpan line deliveries are such an incredible source of comic relief. Did he bring anything to the role that surprised you?
SC: He has such loveliness of care. You know that that person is capable of change. However steadfast they are in a set of principles, with Richard Jenkins, [the character] is capable of changing his mind if there’s a good reason to. He’s compliant in the most beautiful way. He’s not so built into the system that he’ll force his will on a situation that it won’t accommodate. He’ll change. Richard allowed for the possibility to be illuminated.
MH: From your experience making this show, has your own relationships with the men in your life changed?
SC: I think about them more. You get to be our age, and it’s mostly work. I pretty much work with everybody I’m close to, and that’s complicated.
I don’t know that it’s super clear all the time what we do for each other. We need each other to survive. We need each other to pay bills. We need to get along. I don’t really have too many people in my life that there isn’t some necessity for us to be together otherwise. It’s almost like we’re on a deserted island and we all can do like four tasks that allow us to survive. One guy knows how to read the stars and another guy knows how to grow coconuts. But it’s weird to think that everybody has to do something essential or you wouldn’t survive anymore.
I guess it’s left me feeling like I need a little more. Maybe I need to join a pickleball team [laughs] or go to an escape room by myself or something.
MH: Oh man, I’ve done pickleball on bachelor party trips.
SC: It’s not the answer?
MH: It’s not the answer. [Laughs] I mean, you can tear your ACL, but that’s about it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Miles Surrey is a Brooklyn-based culture writer who covers television, film, and whatever your dad is interested in. His work can also be found at The Ringer, Vox, Vice, and The A.V. Club.
