DTF St. Louis

Credit: HBO

I hate to say it, but I was right. In my last piece on HBO’s dark dramedy, DTF St. Louis, I predicted what would happen – though obviously I didn’t guess all the details. Spoilers ahead.

The title of the final episode is important to understanding this show’s most pressing themes. It’s the phrase Modern Love said during his first meeting with Floyd (David Harbour): “No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street.”

In some ways, this is a reference to all the weird, kinky stuff people in suburban America are into. The affairs, the sexual proclivities, the PO boxes. Detectives Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Plumb (Joy Sunday) get a final scene in the finale decompressing after the case, chatting about all the weird sex stuff Homer has learned about. Plumb is happy to educate him, and we get her first genuine smile of the season, big and wide and full of mirth. Curiously, we also get her first real moment of anger earlier in the episode, when Carol (Linda Cardellini) tells her to speak up and she replies, “You can hear me just fine!”

In a deeper and more poignant way, however, this little aphorism is about the inner lives of people we only get small glimpses of, whether those are strangers or loved ones. To Clark (Jason Bateman), Floyd was Mr. Sunshine. A ray of light. He helped the deaf. He was so compassionate, he lost sleep over possibly offending a man he french kissed just to be nice. To Carol, Floyd was those things but also the man who turned down a potentially life-changing career in order to pursue signing, a man in debt, a man who said he’d call the yard guys but didn’t. A man who cried over Batman comics while letting his belly flop down on the lettuce she was about to chop.

To us, the viewers, Floyd was adorable and sparkling with life. He took dance hip hop dance classes at a kids’ dance studio so he could up his game signing at concerts. He was funny and delightful and compassionate. But inside, Floyd was filled with pain and self-loathing, fixated on being overweight and unattractive and, ultimately, unlovable. The way others see us and the way we see ourselves is often irreconcilable.

The way Richard (Arlan Ruf) saw Floyd was even more complicated. In my last piece, I noted that we would need to learn two details about what happened to Floyd: First, how did he die? Not necessarily who killed him, since I was already pretty sure this was suicide, but why? And second, what happened to Floyd’s penis? I wrote:

“A third question might be how these two mysteries ultimately tie into one another. I suspect they must in some way, even if it’s just because Floyd’s sexual troubles are part of why we’ve gotten to where we are in the story to begin with.”

Sure enough, these two mysteries were inextricably bound together by Richard. After Floyd abandoned his career in finance, he and Carol fought. He tells Clark in the finale that every last bit of sexiness and spark in their relationship disappeared that day. He made Carol cry and when they went to bed, Richard – who has a very hard time regulating his feelings – came into the room and hit Floyd in the crotch with a baseball bat (perhaps shining some light on why Floyd is so turned off by Carol’s umpire uniform). Richard is protective of his mother, and Floyd doesn’t hold this against him.

Perhaps the most endearing thing about Floyd this entire season was his relationship with Richard. The way he fought for the kid even after he was permanently injured by him. He tried so hard to connect with Richard, even as the boy pushed him away. And he finally broke through. So it is tragedy piling on tragedy that Richard should stumble on his DTF St. Louis profile and the message between him and Tiger Tiger that night, after his first wonderful day at his new school. It is tragedy piled on tragedy that he should go to the Kevin Kline community pool and see Clark and Floyd dancing in their tighty-whities, and that Floyd should see him there. It’s unclear whether Richard said the things he planned to say – calling him a fat cheater who nobody loves – but it doesn’t matter. Whether he said those words or just turned his back on Floyd makes no difference. The damage was done. Floyd had already let everyone down. He couldn’t bear to let down Richard. In that dark, dark, lonely place, he knocked back the rest of the Amphezyne-laced bloody mary and then put on his clothes, scratched out his face in the Playgirl spread, and died.

DTF St. Louis is a show about loneliness. It is a show more specifically about middle-aged loneliness. Clark, Floyd and Carol are all experiencing this together. I’m a bit younger than the three main leads (Bateman is 57, Harbour 51 and Cardellini 51 – I’m 44) but middle-age lasts a long time, and it’s a weird time. You spend so much of your youth in a battle. All young people, to one degree or another, are filled with the promise of what might be – what they might become, where they might go, what they might do, what they can do if they set their minds to it. The future is uncertain but brimming with promise. Physically, there is a brief time when you are relatively pain-free and filled with energy. You don’t realize it at the time, when you’re in college or coasting through your 20s’, but it’s all very fleeting.

Still, the change is gradual. You don’t walk through a door fromyour youth and end up on the other side, middle-aged. It sneaks in and it keeps sneaking in and you see your kids or your friends’ kids grow up and now they’re teenagers or young adults all filled with verve and vigor and you’re looking in the mirror, counting grey hairs and wondering what happened to all those dreams you once had. That person you remember being is like a stranger to you now, every bit as strange to you as Floyd’s Playgirl spread is to him.

I know some people are not happy with the way this series ended. It’s dark and sad and depressing. Heartbreaking. But it’s also raw and real and powerful. I’ve seen some people express frustration with the way we were misled. All the red herrings that made us think Carol was the killer, for instance. But here’s the thing: DTF St. Louis did all of this on purpose, not just to obscure the case, but to make a point. In some ways, we were getting an incomplete picture of Clark, Floyd and Carol’s relationship because we were on the other side of the glass, just like detectives Homer and Plumb. Like many mysteries, we were only privy to the facts of the case, and those changed the further the detetectives dug.

But unlike most mysteries, I don’t think that was the reason for this storytelling approach. We were being tested. We were shown just enough of each of these characters to make assumptions. Only slices of their lives, of course, only brief moments in time, but those moments led us to form opinions. We saw Carol on a bad day, or Carol throwing herself at Clark, and we decided she must be a terrible person. We saw her treat the detectives badly, and assumed this is how she treated everyone, when in reality it seems clear now that she was trying to throw them off their game because she was worried they’d learn the truth: That Floyd had killed himself, almost certainly breaching the suicide clause in his life insurance.

There is something a little humbling about this experience. Our assumptions were often wrong, or at least mine were (not all, but many of them). This also meant we were often surprised. Surprised by the death and the affair initially and then by the many subsequent reveals: The second bike, the cucking, the Modern Love meetup, and so much more. Very few shows are filled with so many surprises, both delightful and devastating.

This was never going to have a happy ending. That’s one thing nobody should be surprised about. We knew Floyd died from the first episode. There was never going to be a happy reason for this. It’s no shocker when Clark returns to an empty home – totally empty, his wife and kids gone along with the furniture. Everything but the kitchen sink. Clark, alone on the swing, his midlife crisis ending with a whimper, not a bang, his billboards graffitied. His career over. He was no villain, but he made choices that hurt people. His loneliness might seem bizarre, given his loving wife and kids, but life is not so simple. More bizarre, in some ways, is that even with their powerful friendship, neither Clark nor Floyd found that thing they were both looking for. That intangible, elusive thing – happiness? Meaning? Self-love? These are complicated feelings. When Clark finally breaks down and admits to Floyd that he has no idea what he’s doing, that he’s just lonely also, it’s profoundly sad. The fact that these two friends cannot find this thing in one another – not romantic love, but the kind of platonic love that could sustain and fulfil them – is such a brutal revelation.

The battle we fight in youth, our potential against our self-doubt and anxiety, it simmers down over the years. It subsides, but it doesn’t ever really end.