Jason Bateman, Lisa Cardellini and David Harbour star in HBO's new show, DTF: St. Louis

Warner Bros Discovery

This article contains spoilers.

DTF St. Louis is a clever show that’s part true crime and part dark comedy. It offers a surprisingly tender interrogation of friendship, sexuality, aging and masculinity. Frustratingly, though, the show ultimately leans on familiar weight-based tropes, including the use of a fat suit, as narrative shorthand for decline and despair.

The new HBO show is about three middle-aged people – Carol, played by Linda Cardellini, Clark, played by Jason Bateman, and Floyd, played by Stranger Things’ David Harbour – in a more-nuanced-than-usual love triangle. Floyd’s unexplained death in a local community pool complex leaves two detectives looking for the guilty party. The show’s title references a hookup app based in the city of St. Louis and its surrounding suburbs. From the moment we meet Floyd, with his child-like naiveté and his belly poking out from under his shirt, we sense that his fat body is a central point of tension that the show intends to resolve darkly.

Floyd doesn’t just exist in a fat body. He is framed by it. Specifically, his fat body is used as a visual metaphor for doom.

Almost right away, the show immerses the viewer in Floyd’s attempt to lose weight in hopes of becoming more attractive to his disinterested wife, Carol, and to prospects on the app. That Floyd is on a weight-loss journey is given no real narrative scaffolding, as this is just the presumed course of action for a relatable or legible fat character.

The show adeptly portrays a familiar double bind that people in larger bodies face. When Floyd exercises, his effort is framed as a futile spectacle. In a scene where Floyd, who is also a professional ASL interpreter, engages in an extended period of rigorous physical activity while signing for a concert, Carol comments that she hopes he doesn’t have a heart attack and drop dead in front of everyone. So, if Floyd doesn’t exercise, he’s not trying to save his marriage or increase his hookup appeal. If he does exercise, though, it’s life-threatening and scary. Floyd has no latitude. As the show progresses, there seems to be no correct move for Floyd, only different flavors of failure.

At every turn, we are invited as the audience to collude in reducing Floyd to a stereotype. Floyd is a complex character, but he is also undoubtedly a study in culturally pervasive weight stigmatizing views. Floyd’s story line relies on an unspoken rule: fat people can’t win. By the end of the series, Floyd resolves this tension the only way the story seems to permit. He dies.

Watching DTF St. Louis brought to mind the Hays Code that pre-emanated Hollywood from the 1930s to the 1960s. The code, named after Postmaster General Will Hays, was a list of 36 rules around morality designed for the big studios. These rules dictated what kinds of stories could be told, and ultimately how they had to end. Among the code’s many specifics were prohibitions on the depiction of romance between people of different races as well as “sexual perversity,” which included depictions of gay characters. Characters who strayed too far from moral norms could exist, but they were typically ultimately punished or killed off.

Watching DTF St. Louis, it was hard not to feel the presence of a similar, unofficial code that governs fat characters. A character like Floyd can exist, but he cannot transcend the meaning assigned to his body. He can’t have dignity. He can’t outrun death. He can’t even just be a regular man having a regular experience in an American suburb.

One of the most unsettling throughlines in Floyd’s arc is the way his desire is handled. It is something that exposes him, and makes him vulnerable to ridicule, rejection, and ultimately death. This is especially evident in the way his sexuality is portrayed in the show, hovering between humor, discomfort and complete emasculation. In most narratives, desire is humanizing. For Floyd, desire is a liability. Desire is his death sentence, in fact.

Floyd’s death is tragic, but it is also narratively functional. It resolves the tension his character creates because what would it mean for Floyd to live? Would he continue desiring, striving, and existing in a body the show has consistently framed as embarrassing and wrong? Clark (Bateman) gets to go home to find his wife and kids have left him, while Floyd never gets to go home. He dies alone at his own hand. Clark may be a lonely and lost cheater, but Floyd? Floyd is a lonely lost fat man. Clark loses his dignity. Floyd loses his life.

Floyd’s characterization isn’t an isolated case. It belongs to a broader pattern of the depiction of fat tragedy in film and television. In this tragedy, the fat character is hyper-visible, but not fully human. Their trajectory bends toward humiliation, injury, or death.

The Whale, the 2022 film starring Brendan Fraser, is an example of this. Fraser’s character is allowed tenderness and even empathy, but his body is still framed as a slow-motion death sentence. Even in comedy, the pattern holds. In I Feel Pretty, the 2018 film starring Amy Schumer, the joke is that a plus-size woman has to get a head injury to walk through the world believing she’s sexy.

These are different genres and storylines, but they offer the same outcome. The fat body is never just a body. It is always a problem that requires explanation and resolution. Just as the culture posits that fat people are “killing themselves,” we learn in the season finale that Floyd’s method of death was suicide.

The most haunting question DTF: St. Louis leaves behind is not why Floyd dies, but why the story cannot imagine him living. There are very few narrative blueprints in Hollywood for a different ending for Floyd. This lack matters because stories on screen shape the boundaries of what feels possible for real people off screen.

To name the storytelling in the show as part of an informal Hays Code of fatness is not to say that every story about a fat character must be joyful or redemptive. Tragedy has its place, and weight stigma is a very real part of our culture that must be meaningfully reckoned with in visual media. It is also true, however, that actual, real fat people meet people on hookup sites. It is not unusual for fat people to be desired, have sex, cheat, or have messy midlife crises without dying. The problem is that we don’t see a commensurate number of stories that portray that reality. When certain bodies and stories are narratively constrained in ways others are not, it stops being about good storytelling and starts being about upholding problematic stereotypes.

Floyd does not die because his life is inherently unlivable. He dies in the end because his fatness is a kind of “moral deviance” that must be resolved. He dies because, in our culture, death seems more believable than any other outcome for a fat character.