{"id":505323,"date":"2026-02-28T13:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T13:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/505323\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T13:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T13:34:08","slug":"dtf-st-louis-this-david-harbour-whodunnit-about-dating-apps-and-infidelity-is-close-to-the-bone-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/505323\/","title":{"rendered":"DTF St Louis: this David Harbour whodunnit about dating apps and infidelity is close to the bone | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last October, Lily Allen released a jaw-dropping album<\/a> about the sexual politics of her marriage to actor David Harbour<\/a>. It was a musical assassination \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0also wondered whether it might be a televisual return to the erotic thrillers of the 90s. The answer to that one is no, although it\u2019s a show with sex on the brain.<\/p>\n

Everyone knows dating apps are hell, so it\u2019s perverse that we\u2019re all on them now, even married people. They can be a frictionless way to seek out an affair, which is what Harbour\u2019s character, a sign language interpreter called Floyd, does. He\u2019s vigorously assisted by his best friend Clark, played by Jason Bateman<\/a>, a similarly frustrated, middle-aged weatherman. There\u2019s obviously been a cold front in the Missouri area \u2013 but things are heating up!<\/p>\n

Actually, they\u2019re not. Within 25 minutes, Harbour is dead, slumped against the wall of the \u201cKevin Kline Community Pool\u201d 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\u2019s minx of a wife, Carol. I kept shouting at the screen that \u201cit has to be Lily Allen!\u201d but apparently her alibi is watertight. She was in the West End at the time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Confidently written and directed by Steven Conrad, it\u2019s beautifully shot and modern. The murder case\u2019s two investigative leads, Homer and Plumb, are engagingly played by Richard Jenkins<\/a> and Joy Sunday, a bald, white boomer and beautiful, young, Black woman, respectively. They clash from the off \u2013 she is special crimes, he is a county sheriff\u2019s office detective, with jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

Reluctantly working together, it\u2019s 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 \u201cass play\u201d, are hilarious. But hey, who hasn\u2019t googled an outre acronym they\u2019ve seen on the internet? Humiliating, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

The show is less horny, more ennui laden. There are laughs \u2013 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 \u201cump gear\u201d she wears around the house has murdered Floyd\u2019s libido. \u201cIt\u2019s the puffy chest guard and mask. That\u2019s puffy too,\u201d 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\u2019ve ever wanted to see the urbane Bateman, host of the brilliant Smartless<\/a> podcast, being pegged in a hotel room, get stuck in.<\/p>\n

Pacing and plot points are idiosyncratic. Floyd\u2019s weight gain is one. The camera frames his belly, which is out-out. He has Peyronie\u2019s 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\u2019s still an admirably un-vain\u00a0performance.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m increasingly drawn into the four episodes I\u2019ve 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\u2019s if you get off lightly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last October, Lily Allen released a jaw-dropping album about the sexual politics of her marriage to actor David…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-505323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}