DTF St. Louis: This is David Harbor talking about dating apps and infidelity close to the bone | television

toLast October, Lily Allen released a stunning album about the sexual politics surrounding her marriage to actor David Harbour. It was a musical assassination – said to have been written in the wake of her own personal investigation into his long-standing infidelities via the dating app Raya. So the timing of DTF St Louis (Monday 2 March, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), in which Harbor plays a man in a stagnant marriage who downloads a hookup app to enjoy some extramarital prosperity, is exciting. For everyone except his propaganda.

From the trailer, this was a difficult show to read. Was it a black comedy, a bedroom farce, or a police procedural? The answer is yes, to all of these things. I also wondered if this could be a television return to the edgy thrillers of the 1990s. The answer to that is no, even though it is presented with sex on the brain.

Everyone knows dating apps are hell, so it’s weird that we’re all using them now, even married people. It could be an easy way to look for an affair, which is what Harbor’s character, a sign language interpreter named Floyd, does. He is greatly aided by his best friend Clark, played by Jason Bateman, a frustrated middle-aged weatherman. There’s clearly a cold front in the Missouri area, but things are heating up!

In fact, they are not. Within 25 minutes, Harbor was dead, collapsing against the wall of the Kevin Kline Community Pool with a mutilated Indiana Jones-themed girl and a can of murderous Bloody Marys beside him. The seven episodes of the HBO miniseries bring together a puzzle box in classic whodunit style. Clark is implicated first, but there are still question marks over Floyd’s wife, Carol. I kept screaming at the screen, “It’s got to be Lily Allen!” But the excuse for her absence is clearly watertight. It was in the West End at the time.

Written and directed by Stephen Conrad, the film is beautifully shot and modern. The two protagonists of the murder investigation, Homer and Plump, are charismatically played by Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday, a bald white woman and a beautiful young black woman, respectively. They clash from the beginning – they’re private crimes, he’s a detective with the county sheriff’s office, and he has jurisdiction.

Reluctantly working together, Plumb teaches Homer jargon such as sex-positive dating, and rococo psychology about how people go out nowadays. The initials that a confused Jenkins scribbles in his empty notebook, like AP for “ass play,” are funny. But hey, who hasn’t Googled a weird abbreviation they saw online? Insulting, isn’t it?

The show is less exciting and more boring. There are laughs – dark, sad laughs. To help make ends meet (and even though she knows nothing about baseball), Carol (Linda Cardellini) has been umpiring Little League games in her spare time. The padded “bulky gear” she wore around the house killed Floyd’s libido. “It’s the puffy chest protector and the mask. That’s puffy, too,” he lamented to Clark. The two men whisper about their experience with the fantasy dating app in secret chats, as if they were planning a prison escape. If you’d like to see the suave Batman, host of the awesome Smartless podcast, staying in a hotel room, go for it.

The pacing and plot points are outstanding. Floyd’s weight gain is one. The camera frames his belly sticking out. He suffers from Peyronie’s disease, which has caused his penis to be grotesquely curved, which is another mystery raised throughout the series. However, Floyd is pure in spirit; The only ride he gets is the shirt that rides over his stomach even in death. We see him in retrospect, working as a deaf interpreter at hip-hop shows, throwing himself into expressive choreography with surprising grace, while scenes of him teaching American Sign Language to his friend are moving. One can understand why Harbor took the job, but it’s still an impressively ineffective performance.

I was increasingly drawn to the four episodes I saw. The malaise of middle-aged marriage is a familiar theme, but DTF manages to take it to strange places, with unexpected twists, solid detective thrills, suburban ennui, and a dry sense of humor. Although the main idea is that if you use dating apps, you will instantly get killed in the pool. This is if you go down lightly.