But despite its generic foundations, it’s clear from the start that DTF St. Louis is something stranger, and sadder, than a standard noir. It’s not only the show’s idiosyncratic use of locations, or its inspired casting—including Jenkins and Sunday as TV’s unlikeliest investigative team—or its extravagant lark of a credits sequence (Jason Bateman doing slow-motion karate kicks to “Let the Sunshine In”) that differentiates its approach from the dogged realism of so much prestige drama. It is also the quality and delivery of the show’s mannered and delightfully off-kilter dialogue, which combines the unnaturally laggy rhythms of the line readings in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return with the absurdist locutions of an I Think You Should Leave sketch. (The pilot, for instance, includes the emphatically Tim Robinson–esque line of protest: “He was being argumentative during my sand time!”)
To date, DTF St. Louis has been rightfully celebrated for offering an offbeat take on familiar themes of male loneliness and suburban ennui. Indeed, Conrad himself has confirmed that he and his writers typically start with themes, explaining that “themes are really where it’s at for us.” DTF, in particular, deserves credit for refusing to indulge in homosexual panic, in order to explore more interesting questions about men’s sexuality: how “friendship feelings” can turn into something more “complex,” as Clark puts it, or how the desire to desire might tempt people to try and force the intimacies they want into being.
Even more remarkable, however, is how the show, much like Conrad’s body of work as a whole, invites us to think about serial television form. It is a relatively narrow expressive range in which streaming-era series—notwithstanding the ostensible freedom offered by the medium’s third golden age—typically operate. However outlandish their premise or nonlinear their storytelling, when it comes to aesthetics, most still tend toward verisimilitude, and toward a minimally visible style. Without making the same kinds of demands as more openly “batshit” examples of recent small-screen experimentation, like Lynch’s The Return (2017) or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young (2019), Conrad’s series provide a steady drip of visual and auditory surprise, a low-key television of attractions.
If novelty has always been a vehicle for viewer pleasure—or at least some viewers’ pleasure—it feels especially welcome, even reassuring, in this moment of anticipatory cultural entropy, amid the fear that everything, everywhere, may be sliding toward slop. In this context, textual oddity appreciates in value. As James Poniewozik noted on Emmys night, one thing Outstanding Drama Series nominee Pluribus (2025– ) had going for it was sheer weirdness: “[I]t’s one of the rare series I’ve watched and thought, ‘I have never really watched anything like this before.’” Meanwhile, in his review of one of the year’s other best new shows, Widow’s Bay, Phillip Maciak praises the series, which “surprises us again and again,” as “such an extravagant bespoke amalgam of forms, such a whirligig of influence and reference that all of its overlapping echoes turn into a single, caterwauling, startlingly new sound.”
