{"id":497763,"date":"2026-03-01T16:09:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T16:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/497763\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T16:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T16:09:08","slug":"jason-batemans-hbo-show-wants-to-be-the-new-white-lotus-welp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/497763\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Bateman\u2019s HBO show wants to be the new White Lotus. Welp."},"content":{"rendered":"

In the past six months, the image that springs to mind when you hear the words \u201cDavid Harbour\u201d has probably gone from gruff but loveable small-town sheriff<\/a>, or perhaps second-tier Marvel hero<\/a>, to a Duane Reade bag filled with used sex toys. Stranger Things vaulted Harbour from that-guy status to big-screen star, playing variations on a man\u2014or, in the case of Hellboy, a horned half-demon\u2014clawing his way back from rock bottom, beaten down by life, yet not quite as broken as he seems. But it\u2019s hard to look at Harbour now and not think, at least fleetingly, of the portrait painted by his ex-wife Lily Allen, whose most recent album, West End Girl<\/a>, is a blow-by-blow account of the end of their five-year marriage that paints Harbour as a compulsive sex addict using his newfound wealth to blind his wife with extravagant gestures while he gorges himself at an open buffet.<\/p>\n

That makes him, in essence, the polar opposite of Floyd, his character on the new HBO miniseries DTF St. Louis. If Harbour is a player, Floyd is one of life\u2019s played, a stalled-out suburban dad who lugs around a giant beer belly like it\u2019s a sack full of his life\u2019s regrets. An American Sign Language interpreter, Floyd strikes up a friendship with Clark (Jason Bateman), a TV weatherman who uses live interpretation in some of his broadcasts. Clark, who beams down at their middling Midwestern town from a billboard that promises sunny days ahead, seems to Floyd to have everything he lacks\u2014security, prestige, a sense of purpose\u2014so much so that he doesn\u2019t notice how miserably unhappy Clark is.<\/p>\n

Floyd gets his first hint when Clark pulls him aside to tell him about a new app he\u2019s been looking into: DTF St. Louis, which promises clandestine hookups for people looking to stray outside the bounds of their marriage. Floyd\u2019s not interested at first, despite the fact that he\u2019s lost all interest in his wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), who\u2019s been moonlighting as a Little League umpire in order to keep their family financially afloat. Floyd works only sporadically\u2014in fact, we rarely see him work at all\u2014and Carol already has a full-time job at Purina. But her side gig, he claims, has killed his longing for her, because every time they\u2019re about to have sex, he pictures her in her oversized padding and cage-like mask. To be fair, it\u2019s not all her fault, he tells Clark. \u201cI\u2019m sure there\u2019s something I do that turns her off,\u201d Floyd admits. \u201cI don\u2019t know what.\u201d Cut to Floyd schlumping around their kitchen in his boxers, gut spilling everywhere, while Carol takes care of business in her corporate fleece.<\/p>\n

Steven Conrad, a longtime screenwriter and more recent showrunner whose credits include The Pursuit of Happyness and the Prime Video series Patriot, seems to have conceived of his new show as a dark-hued comedy. But it\u2019s as if he neglected to inform his actors, whose performances are soaked in middle-aged discontent, or his cinematographer, who gives the series a uniformly gray and downcast feel. It sure doesn\u2019t help that one of the main characters turns up dead halfway through the first episode, splayed out in the changing area of a public pool named for Kevin Kline.<\/p>\n

After Big Little Lies<\/a> and The White Lotus<\/a>, it seems that HBO no longer knows how to tell a story about unhappy couples without bringing murder into it. (Harbour, who spent years working with Conrad to develop the series, has explicitly cited The White Lotus as an inspiration<\/a>.) But in DTF St. Louis, the device feels especially egregious, because it\u2019s not dealing with characters whose outwardly fabulous lives conceal a dark underbelly. It would only take one glance at Floyd to identify him as an aimless schmuck, a guy who carries his own personal rain cloud with him wherever he goes, but the show keeps finding new ways to humiliate him. It\u2019s not bad enough that he\u2019s fat and mostly unemployed, or even, as he tells Clark early on, that he\u2019s got a medical condition that results in him having a curved penis\u2014the show also has to hint at that condition being the result of a significant trauma, and then drag out revealing the precise nature of that trauma for longer than the four episodes sent to critics. Floyd has been kicked in the balls by life, and that\u2019s not just a metaphor.<\/p>\n

In order to stretch out what seems to be a fairly thin story over seven episodes, DTF St. Louis starts hopping around in time from the moment the corpse is discovered, and two detectives\u2014one a lethargic old white man (Richard Jenkins), the other an ambitious young Black woman (Joy Sunday)\u2014take on the case. There are revelations to come, of course, but they\u2019re not particularly shocking. In fact, the show sometimes wrongfoots us in the other direction, making us expect some salacious tidbit is about to surface and then revealing some entirely mundane bit of entry-level kink, as if to suggest that the things people treat as deep, dark secrets are rarely as perverse or freakish as they might fear. If Floyd could have just gotten up the nerve to tell his wife that her umpire outfit was a boner-killer, none of this would have happened.<\/p>\n

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The weird aspects of DTF St. Louis come not in its characters\u2019 predilections, but in tone and staging. At times, it\u2019s unrelentingly morose, at others broadly comic, as when Jenkins\u2019 detective learns that one of the DTF app\u2019s users expressed a preference for ass play, and he dutifully whips out his notebook to jot down the letters A and P. Then there\u2019s his habit of conducting interviews for a murder investigation in the lobby of his police precinct, a vacant black box with constant foot traffic where he sits a dozen feet away from his suspects. Is this some odd feint at abstraction, or maybe just history\u2019s most low-budget reshoot? (Possibly they overspent on the scene where a suspect\u2019s credit-card statements are spread out across a wall full of TV monitors like this suburban police station is NASA Mission Control?) Perhaps that, like the mystery of Floyd\u2019s bent dick, is to be solved in the final three episodes.<\/p>\n

Conrad writes most acutely when he\u2019s sitting in the malaise of midlife, probing the gallows-humor resignation to the reality that few people\u2019s lives turn out the way they wanted. When Carol laments that Floyd \u201cused to be, like \u2026 ,\u201d Clark cuts her off and says, \u201cWe all used to be like.\u201d A more confident show, or a more honest one, might have stuck with that feeling, rather than ginning up a plot better suited for a true-crime podcast. But maybe it\u2019s the final proof of the characters\u2019 banality that not even a murder mystery can make them interesting.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the past six months, the image that springs to mind when you hear the words \u201cDavid Harbour\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,1036,3071,88,1035,3007,49094],"class_list":["post-497763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-comedy","tag-crime","tag-entertainment","tag-hbo","tag-relationships","tag-the-white-lotus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}