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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n
If True Detective had possessed even a sliver of a funny bone, it might have looked something like DTF St Louis. Creator, writer and director Steven Conrad has produced an eerie, unsettling and tragic new series ostensibly about men but really about desire and loneliness in the Missouri suburbs. It is both surreal and wry, unexpectedly tender and viciously humorous. This is a brilliantly, brutally fresh TV show.<\/p>\n
Ozark<\/a> star Jason Bateman, who has carved out a career in slippery men, plays St Louis weatherman Clark Forrest, who rides a recumbent \u201cnerd bike\u201d to work and plays wholesome board games with his wife and children. While reporting on a tornado, ASL interpreter Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) saves Clark from being clattered with a road sign. The two strike up a friendship over steak, yoga and backyard games of cornhole.<\/p>\n This blossoming bromance takes a darker turn when Clark introduces Floyd to a local app called DTF St Louis, an Ashley Madison<\/a>-style hook-up service to facilitate married people having affairs. Floyd\u2019s marriage to Carol (an icy, brittle Linda Cardellini) is struggling, and Floyd seems all too keen to investigate other options. Clark\u2019s true role in the story unfurls slowly, but little is as it seems.<\/p>\n The show is shot beautifully and strangely, with a Lynchian eye for the uncanny gothic of the suburbs. Floyd has a stepson, Richard (Arlan Ruf) \u2014 think AJ Soprano at his most belligerent \u2014 who hates him, despite Floyd\u2019s best efforts to bond. In therapy, when they are forced to hug, the camera looks up at them from the place where Floyd\u2019s sizeable belly should be. These disorientating perspectives, from the edge of a moving garden swing or from a woman\u2019s feet, give the sense that reality is warping.<\/p>\n DTF is too funny and absurd to be pretentious, but nevertheless, it has a stagey, theatrical feel, particularly in the dialogue. Characters repeat lines and talk over each other. Their references are ordinary and mundane \u2014 they visit or talk about Jamba Juice or a bland hotel called the Quality Garden Suites, where an affair takes place \u2014 but the characters twirl their words around as if they\u2019re on a dancefloor. Entire storylines take place in montage, with a single-note soundtrack to ramp up the weirdness. It feels different to anything else, though in a similar galaxy to the work of Nathan Fielder or Tim Robinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n