A new miniseries on HBO, “DTF St. Louis”, dropped its first episode Sunday, and it was very disappointing.
With an intriguing premise and a stacked cast of David Harbor, Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini, the first episode was 51 minutes of just waiting for something interesting to happen.
The show follows Floyd and Carol, a married couple, and Clark, Floyd’s colleague and close friend. When Floyd and Clark admit their marriages lack excitement, they turn to the DTF St. Louis app to explore extramarital affairs. This leads to a love triangle and, ultimately, Floyd’s death.
The series premiere is slow and puts a lot of effort into developing our characters. It also jumps around in time, which doesn’t help the feeling that the show you’re watching isn’t actually showing you anything. I would like to think, considering how the episode ended, that the series would go back to explain what happened in those time jumps, but I won’t be sticking around for that.
And jumping around in time is a great way of storytelling because it allows there to be a sense of mystery at all times, but I think that this show would’ve been better off only doing one time jump to show that Floyd was murdered and actually allowed the audience to see how Clark and Floyd began their friendship. In the first episode of a show, you want to grab the viewers’ attention and make them jump through time with a promise that the rest of the series will go back to those moments.
The show is also promised to be a dark comedy, which was something I was really looking forward to, but girl, I wasn’t laughing.
The show places an emphasis upon male friendship, which I think is something interesting, especially in the age of the male loneliness epidemic. However, I don’t know if having an affair with your best friend’s wife and then killing him is the kind of friend men should be modeling themselves after.
I will say the show does pick up towards the end when the police are figuring out that Floyd’s death wasn’t from natural causes but was murder, and they start looking at Clark as a suspect for it.
Unfortunately, this show is weak and drags on. It’s the perfect show to put on if you want to be on your phone the entire time. I would’ve thought a story about cheating and murder would be right up my alley, but this one just isn’t doing it. Maybe that’s because they want me to care about middle-aged men who aren’t turned on by their wives anymore, but I don’t have that in me for seven episodes.
Rating: 2/5.