I haven’t been in a long-term relationship before. (What a way to open a TV recap.) But I know the thousand-yard stare when a partner loses interest. They speak in short sentences. They appear nonchalant to mask their disdain. Their energy is flat; lights are on, but no one’s home. On the flipside, I also know (and yes, feel the thrill) of the mutual chase. The sun shines brighter. You jump whenever your phone buzzes with their name. You share pointless references, but the movie in your head gives them symbolic weight.
I’ve been David Harbour before, ignoring every sign that the person I’m seeing is checked out. I’ve also been Jason Bateman, enjoying a ball game with someone I thought was just a friend, until I’m told I can “snag” whatever’s between their thighs. DTF St. Louis’ enthralling second episode, “Snag It,” dives deep into the doomed love triangle that gives the show its intrigue. It isn’t even a terribly sexy affair, despite the might of Linda Cardellini openly appealing to a generation awakened from seeing Velma be hotter than Daphne. It’s an affair that happens because it happens; one day you’re at a dumb cornhole party, and suddenly you’re answering to the police. Life comes at you that fast.
“I Wanted to Give the Deaf Audience a Richer Experience”
Before I ramble about Bateman and Cardellini’s Clark and Carol, respectively, we need to spotlight on David Harbour as Floyd Smernitch. It matters that he opens this episode in a an exclusively friendly exchange with Clark’s wife, their tone a world apart from Clark and Carol planting the seeds of their infidelity just 40 feet away.
It says a lot how Frank takes everything in his life not just seriously, but sincerely. As a professional sign language interpreter, he felt it mattered that deaf, likely drunk festival attendees get “a richer experience” by his onstage signing. So he took over his son’s already-paid-for dance classes to learn to weave ASL into rhythm. That’s an awfully endearing perspective that makes his murder (?) so much more heartbreaking, and the picture of his marriage all the clearer. He’s a man eager to spend time and effort where others, maybe his own wife, aren’t willing to do the same. (And yes, David Harbour dancing with 12-year-olds to “Lip Gloss” is a sight to behold.)
It’s perhaps pity Carol feels when she sees her husband in a new light, quite literally. At a summer festival where Frank is on the job, a teary Carol, just before breaking things off with Clark, realizes that her husband “is trying so hard.” She says they’re both worried about his weight, “but we’re working on it.” She also hopes his poor heart doesn’t burst. (Oh, sweet, sweet subtext—DTF St. Louis is gentle but it is not at all subtle.)
Yes, it’s one of the funniest scenes in the entire show: Cardellini selling the hell out of a deeply personal revelation as a rotund David Harbour shakes and shimmies to “Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels.” But it’s also a moving one. Who among us hasn’t felt clarity about a situation at the strangest and unlikeliest of places? Who among us hasn’t felt renewed appreciation for someone just when we thought it was all over? “I want to be old with him,” Carol finally admits. Again, life comes at you fast. One minute, your husband is dancing to cheers on stage; the next, he’s dead inside a swimming pool locker room.
I’ll repeat that DTF St. Louis is officially divorced from the 2017 New Yorker article about a married woman and her affair with a family dentist. But in that piece, the husband and wife spend a pivotal weekend at Mohegan Sun Casino, where the wife recommits to making their marriage work. Safe to assume that, had DTF St. Louis stayed a straightforward adaptation, Cardellini would be surrounded by slot machines and blackjack tables instead.
“You Could Probably Just Touch It”
One of the best choices DTF St. Louis makes is that Carol and Clark’s affair doesn’t happen because, I don’t know, they touch hands in the kitchen while baking cookies. It’s an affair that happens because they just invite it. Clark invents a fake side hustle so he can call himself “Bang Master,” Carol hides behind innuendo over car batteries and beers tucked in her crotch and the accentuated way she dares him to not “pussy out”—they both live stable but unspectacular lives where sex and intrigue have taken a backseat to routine.
Maybe it’s nice to feel something, anything, again. “I would like you to sit on my face,” Clark requests of Carol, reeking of suppressed desperation. I’m not smart enough to parse out the psychology of kinks related to trauma, I just know that this affair, like many others, is filler for a void.
If DTF St. Louis excels in probing the people engaged in an affair-turned-murder mystery, it falters when it actually tries to investigate it from an outsider’s eyes. Whenever the show zips back to the police’s perspective, I feel it practically slamming on the brakes. In episode 2, Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday return as their contentious detectives. Jenkins’ Homer is so certain, arrogantly so, that this matter is a seen-it-all-before, open-and-shut case of infidelity and closeted anxieties.
Sunday’s Plumb, however, feels there’s something else going on. Sure enough, she’s proven right when she deduces the naked Indiana Jones magazine spread found on Frank’s person wasn’t cheap porn but a tragic reminder of his past. It’s Frank in the magazine, younger and strapping than the man Carol is (was) married to. The show leaves us hanging on all the obvious questions, but it’s frankly less exciting when it’s cops asking it than the people actually involved posing it to us.
But the investigation, at last, gives us a better look at the titular dating app partially responsible for Frank’s murder. As Homer suspects, Frank got on the app to hook up with men on the side. Or did he? “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” a guarded Clark says. We revisit moments from episode 1 that supposedly shine a greater light on Frank’s clandestine hookups, but I suspect things still aren’t what they look. Just like with Carol, whose meet-cute with Clark at their Jamba Juice was not a happy coincidence but wholly engineered on her part. (A bladder of steel she possesses to drink that many juices.) Carol might look like a suburban mom, but she’s more calculating than she appears.
While DTF St. Louis is becoming ho-hum as a cop show, it remains spectacular as a juicy and messy drama about people who fail to recognize what they want when they have it. I’m drawn in by that side of the show, the Clark and Carol and Frank of it all, than I am with the cops in a lethargic subplot about trusting one’s own instincts and learning to look beyond the obvious. But maybe I’m just not looking close enough. After all, I have missed signals before.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.esquire.com ’
