Jason Bateman, David Harbour, and Linda Cardellini Enter a Deadly Love Triangle in DTF St. Louis

An exclusive first look at Steven Conrad’s new limited series, about three messy, middle-aged Midwesterners who make a lethal mistake.
By Chris Murphy

January 22, 2026

The Midwest is usually associated with uncomplicated kindness—nice, polite people who like college football, a cold beer, and (recent events in Minnesota notwithstanding) treating their neighbors with dignity and respect. But as an oft repeated phrase on Steven Conrad’s new HBO show warns, there’s more to Midwesterners than meets the eye.

“No one’s normal,” says Conrad, Zooming in from California. “It just looks that way from across the street.”

In the HBO limited series DTF St. Louis, Conrad explores the darkness just beyond a Midwestern city’s white picket fences. The seven-episode dark comedy stars Emmy favorites Jason Bateman, David Harbour, and Linda Cardellini as three middle-aged St. Louis residents grappling with ennui, loneliness, and hidden desires, becoming enmeshed in a love triangle that leaves one of them dead.

As a writer, Conrad—who sold his first screenplay at the age of 19—has always been interested in messiness. “[There’s] a set of themes I’ve liked since I was a young person learning how to write: You watch somebody you like make a mistake, and you watch them try to make up for it,” he says. “You cheer for them to be able to do that. But like most of the consequential mistakes in our life, there really is no complete way to make it all better again.”

Conrad doubles down on that central theme in DTF St. Louis, creating a series that explores how our mistakes—and desires—only compound with age. “The older I got, it occurred to me that we keep making them. There are plenty of middle-aged mistakes,” he says.

Bateman—also an executive producer on the series—was the perfect vessel to convey these ideas. He stars in the show as Clark Forrest, a hot weatherman and a micro-celebrity in the greater St. Louis area. While reporting on a storm, he’s paired with a good-hearted yet simple ASL interpreter named Floyd, played by Harbour. An unlikely friendship between the two blossoms, leading Clark to meet Floyd’s wife, Cardellini’s Carol—a previously single mother struggling to support a troubled tweenage-year-old son and an under-employed husband. The also-married Clark introduces Floyd to a new app called DTF St. Louis, made for singles and swingers looking to spice up their marriages. After a few fateful swipes, everyone’s lives begin to change.

“We show some billboards for DTF St. Louis, and their log line is, ‘All of the excitement, none of the consequences,’” Conrad tells me. “A smart person would know that that’s impossible.”

But Floyd, Clark, and Carol might not be all that bright. Or at the very least, they’re all willing to engage in the fantasy DTF St. Louis offers—the possibility of briefly escaping their disappointing lives. “These three people are simultaneously letting their passions come out after years of not really being able to live inside of them, hoping that there aren’t real heavy consequences for that,” says Conrad. Unfortunately for one of them, the consequences are deadly.

DTF St. Louis seems to share a few thematic parallels with the scandal that embroiled Harbour last year after his estranged wife, British pop star Lily Allen, released an ultra-confessional, critically acclaimed album “inspired by what went on in the relationship.” According to Allen’s album, Harbour would’ve allegedly transgressed past the bounds of their open marriage. (At the time, Harbour did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)

The topic didn’t come up in our conversation. But Conrad did have plenty of thoughts on the ever-shifting nature of marriage, as well as the complicated intersections of kink, jealousy, and infidelity as they play out on his show. “These infidelities, these flirtations, and these sharing of passions outside your marriage, they add up to a heavy toll,” says Conrad. Floyd, Carol, and Clark are “living with their families, but they’re also still living with their kinks and everything else that they’ve had all their grown-up lives. Those dark passions, they don’t go away. You learn to suppress them, avoid them, postpone them.”

Along with face-sitting, sex robots, and something called “Amazon position,” DTF St. Louis explores a number of topics including but not limited to roller dance, the pommel horse, fortune tellers, Little League umpires, the enduring power of the phrase “no way, José,” recumbent bicycles, the male-loneliness epidemic, hip-hop dance class, cornhole, and abnormally shaped genitalia. Looming over the wonderfully weird mix is a murder mystery that, for a time, provides more questions than answers.

Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins and Wednesday star Joy Sunday round out the cast as the odd-couple detective team determined to solve that mystery. “They’re all actors who are capable of anything,” says Conrad. “This cast, they really are limitless in terms of the emotions that they can conceive and then share.” Particularly his central trio. All three must commit emotionally while “dealing with this idea that in middle age, you aren’t walking around in the body of your dreams anymore. How [do] you cope with that?” he says. “Everybody in this cast fully committed, but those three really had some heavy lifting to do, in terms of being brave.”

St. Louis natives with sharp eyes might be straining to see familiar architecture on the series; that’s because DTF St. Louis was mostly shot in Atlanta. So why did Conrad choose that setting? “This show could have been called DTF Chicago. It just didn’t have the ring to my ear,” he says. “Why I wanted to set it in the Midwest was that people who don’t live in the Midwest make these suppositions that the people who live there are a little more normal. St. Louis became a way to surprise the audience with what actually is taking place behind these closed doors, in a place you have mistakenly assumed was pretty peaceful and quiet.”

Swinging is having a bit of a moment on TV, thanks to shows like Couple to Throuple and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives delving into the formerly taboo subject. But DTF St. Louis goes deeper, exploring the machinations and motivations behind the swinging—and what can happen when it all comes crashing. “If someone were to say to you as a grown-up person, ‘You can tell me what your kinks are and I won’t judge you,’ there’s tension when you wait for that answer. Right?” says Conrad. “We try in every episode to explore suspense based on what is the honest portrayal of the things that we’re hungry for.”

And sometimes, what we already have isn’t enough to satisfy us. “What is the right way to acknowledge that you want more?” Conrad asks. “What will you lose if that were the case?” And for all the soul-searching and probing, Conrad is well aware that kink can lead to comedy—up to a point. “Other people’s kinks are funny,” he says. “Your own are not.”

Linda Cardellini in DTF St. Louis. Tina Rowden/HBO