Linda Cardellini knew something was up when a random stranger would shout “Strawberry Breeze!” as she was crossing the street. For David Harbour, it was the messages pouring in from friends — not the usual “great job!” an actor receives when a program is airing, but long blocks of text, paragraphs dripping with emotion. Jason Bateman was hearing from pals too, reporting the conversations they were overhearing at restaurants and bars. And for “DTF St. Louis” writer-director Steven Conrad, it was his favorite bartender in Chicago telling a couple of patrons about how much she didn’t like this new show on HBO, the one with the acronym you wouldn’t repeat in polite company. “At least she was watching,” Conrad says, laughing. “And it sounded like she was watching based on a recommendation, which meant somebody else was watching too. I took that as a good sign.” “DTF St. Louis” was indeed watched, gaining viewers week to week as it aired in the spring. On the surface, it looked like a limited series straight out of the HBO playbook, a murder mystery driven by sex and midlife ennui. Floyd (Harbour) joins a hookup app looking for sex and winds up dead. His wife, Carol (Cardellini), has been having a kinky affair with weatherman Clark (Bateman). Meanwhile, Clark and Floyd strike up a deep friendship, easing their suburban loneliness. But it turns out that these are not bad people. They just make bad decisions. And by the end we feel for all of them.Nominated for 13 Emmys — including series; writing and directing for Conrad; and acting nods for Bateman, Cardellini, Harbour and Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday, who play detectives investigating Floyd’s death — “DTF St. Louis” became one of the year’s most talked-about limited series. Like the events in the show, it could have gone terribly wrong. How did they get it so right? We spoke to the principals. Grab one of the show’s signature Jamba Juices and settle in. David Harbour. (Erik Carter / For The Times) Harbour [also executive producer]: For a long time, “DTF St. Louis” was not the title. It was “Area Weatherman Charged With Murder.”Cardellini: [Laughs] That’s different. I felt like I couldn’t tell people — my parents, my teenage daughter — the title. I kept telling them it was untitled. The other day I was at a school event, and a parent came up to me and said, “Oh, I watched your show, you know the one? Well, I can’t say it in front of the children.” And then she whispered in my ear, and I said, “Yes, I know that one.”Conrad: I was 54 when I started to write “DTF St. Louis.” My friends are the same age, and I had seen the threat that middle age poses, the compulsion to make really poor choices at the cost of so much. It was endemic around my group of friends — failed marriages, kids go to college and marriages split up, impulsive decisions to cheat. That felt like a good place to start.Harbour: The “DTF” title is a joke. It has nothing to do with the show. The DTF app is a red herring, setting up suburban noir and salaciousness. It looks like a Lifetime movie, but the payoff is optimistic in what it says about human nature. Cardellini: My parents never did get back to me when they found out the title. Harbour: The more intimate something becomes, the less people want to ask you. Bateman: The thing I found beautiful, and also heartbreaking, was just how open and vulnerable these characters are and how little artifice there is in their lives. Floyd and Clark, these two guys are almost completely devoid of swagger. We’re in a country that really puts a premium on swagger, on faking it till you make it. And they’re incapable of that. Linda Cardellini. (Erik Carter / For The Times) Cardellini: My first day was sitting on Jason’s face on a date. Conrad: I have a small group of people who have worked for me for 10 years or so. We know each other well. That didn’t prevent me from being embarrassed when I handed out tasks like, “Find me a kink that nobody else has.” And the report came back: That doesn’t exist. Cardellini: That’s what Steve told me when I asked, “How’d you land on the umpire thing?” [Carol takes up umping, wearing a chest protector around the house — a major turnoff for Floyd.] And he said, “I was just trying to find something that no one was into — or if they were, it was still funny.”Conrad: I’d come up with something like the scratchy safety vests they make you wear when you go fishing on a boat. No one could have a sexual interest in that. And lo and behold, there’s a subgroup of people dedicated to incorporating those vests into their sex lives. Harbour: The show’s on the razor’s edge of tone. The characters feel strange, maybe heightened, but they’re people you could meet in real life. Conrad: Face-sitting, or what Clark calls “weight placement,” that surprised me, the extent to which that was something people request. You learn to leave your judgment at the door, though, because you realize that to divulge any of your kinks involves a wonderful intimacy. It really is the allure that Carol has over Clark.Bateman: There’s something lovely [about] watching characters bang around through these life choices they’ve made without the skills to manage it. It’s the antithesis of all the coping mechanisms that our culture almost demands you adopt. Cardellini: Tone was my big question. I’ve played in the dramedy realm a long time, and the tone can go many different ways. You don’t warm up to Carol at the beginning, and it’s on purpose. She’s opaque. So I asked Steve, “What’s her sense of humor? What is her social lubricant?” And he said, “She likes to do voices.” Jason Bateman in “DTF St. Louis.” (HBO) Harbour: Doesn’t she imitate Batman?Cardellini: Yes! And I asked Steve, “Does she think she’s good at it?” Yes! “Is she good at it?” No! And I thought that was hilarious. Bateman: Clark became more wide-eyed than I originally planned. He’s a weatherman, so there’s a degree of polish and capability to him that runs counter to the vulnerability and virginal aspects of his character. Harbour: Traditionally in art, there’s two realities in us — part of us is gods and part of us is animals. Floyd struggles with the idea that he is a good man, but, biologically, no one finds him attractive. He tries to reconcile this. And, ultimately, at the end in that pool-house scene, he believes that if a man can get an honest boner in his presence, he will feel validated as an animal on this planet. And when Jason can’t do that, Floyd doesn’t go away. He still loves his friend. But there is a piece of him that realizes he probably can’t exist anymore. And when his son sees the horror of Floyd’s need for biological validation, Floyd realizes, “I’m just going to kill myself.” Bateman: What happens is so tragic. That pool-house scene is close to 10 pages long. Dancing, to me, is kryptonite to start, and then I’m in my underwear. I don’t know if “anxiety” is the right word, but it’s a close cousin to whatever the word would be. And we did it all in one take, and I remember Steve coming out with tears coming down his face. I was so relieved. Conrad: The Barry White song they danced to came in the edit. Max Koepke, one of our two editors, found it. That song helped me find that maybe there was a little river of romance in their imaginations in that moment. I don’t remember the song that was playing when we shot it.Harbour: It was “Bump It” by Erykah Badu. I think it works better now, but I do miss the purity of the moves we made to “Bump It.” Conrad: What’s next for Clark? I sure hope he buys a book about single parenting. If he was sitting next to me on a plane and asking for single-parenting advice, I’d tell him to find someone to teach him how to cook. He’s out of work. He’s going to have some time on his hands.Bateman: Maybe he goes next door and talks to that couple and sees if they’re interested in getting involved in a throuple. [Laughs]Harbour: That’s a nice sequel. I’d watch that. Cardellini: I think those people move out. Or build a higher fence. There’s a creep next door! [Laughs]Conrad: Carol is going to have to keep scrapping and not let anything worse happen to her son. Her life for the next eight years that he’s in her household is just to try to be a little more normal.Cardellini: I think she and her son go into therapy together. She’s going to have to figure out how to afford that. Maybe ump a few more games? And I think she ends up missing Floyd for the rest of her life.Conrad: I have given some thought to a “DTF Los Angeles.”Cardellini: There’s a lot of broken dreams here. Harbour: A lot of tragedy and Botox and implants gone wrong. Butt lift murders? BBL murders? I’d like the weatherman idea to continue. Steve loves weathermen. Cardellini: Who doesn’t? Dallas Raines? That’s a great name!Conrad: One of the surprises people find when they relocate to Los Angeles is how hard people work. Not everyone’s an actor. They have jobs. It’s a tremendously hardworking town. If it was a car, it’d have only one gear, and I have some thoughts about the costs of that. I’d be excited to do a “DTF Los Angeles.”
