DTF St. Louis Recap: A Little Suburban Danger

DTF St. Louis
The Denny’s Plan
Season 1 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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DTF St. Louis’s penultimate episode takes us back to the app that started it all. It’s 2018, and what might have been an everyday vanilla love affair between suburban neighbors in an earlier, simpler time rapidly mutates into a whole ass “Denny’s Plan” in which a local weatherman hires a guy to pretend to be a fake guy from an app to get a boner for his schlubby ASL interpreter buddy … who said weatherman also happens to be cucking on the regular at a local business hotel.

At its core, DTF is an apt, idiosyncratic portrait of the male loneliness epidemic and the diabolical advent of dating technology in the 21st century. Which is why it’s still a shame that the investigative framing device and padded seven-episode run do very little to illuminate the story. Sure, the whole murder-mystery conceit and back-and-forth in time fill the mandate of being a mid-tier dramedy for your average Netflix-brained HBO Max viewer, but it’s also where the seams are showing in every episode. Take this week’s interrogation interview with Clark, the first one with a lawyer present, though that ultimately does little to differentiate between this and every other present-time interview with Clark: he’s buttoned up at first, then something triggers his feelings for Floyd, and he begins to confess, which leads to another key flashback.

Which isn’t to say the flashback itself isn’t genuinely meaty. “The Denny’s Plan” takes us back to the moment, as Clark puts it, that he decided he was going to cheat on his wife. “BEWARE!” Another grim, awkward moment for Bateman to cook with as he awkwardly makes the exclamation during a weather report, complete with the karate kick-punch and yoga pose we’ve seen in slow motion, out of context in the opening credits sequence. A mundane, quietly absurd moment of unexamined anxiousness and isolation comes to the surface in an unexpected time and place, which Clark interprets later that day while braiding his daughter’s hair as a clogged mental and emotional valve, the buildup keeping him from being present for life’s important moments. I guess when you can’t do the weather or listen to your kid’s nonsensical stories without drifting into thoughts about fucking someone underwater, that’s when it’s time to release the valve by cheating on your wife. The next day, Carol Smernitch comes along with a whole lotta DTF energy, and before you know it, you’re watching her squirm at her husband’s touch from behind a hotel closet. “A little suburban danger,” as Clark describes it. At least, that was the plan before he made a best friend out of the guy he was cucking. 

It’s unfortunate that Floyd and Clark’s relationship has gotten so strong at the expense of Carol’s characterization. On the investigation front, Detectives Homer and Plumb are seeing what they can get on Carol’s prior conviction, which is still locked behind an expunged record. They’re hoping that, once they get the information on Carol via a false application to their department, they can tie her to the mystery bike in the surveillance footage. Okay. I get intellectually that the shifting omniscient viewpoint of Carol from Black-Widow Karen in a Showtime erotic thriller to a three-dimensional everywoman buried under the economic impossibilities of 21st-century suburban have-it-all-ism is fully in line with the show’s sad, banal suburban milieu. But her character has only grown more vague the more she’s positioned as the main murder suspect, while Clark and Floyd have become only more vivid as characters the closer we get to the finale. 

Especially once the titular “Denny’s Plan” comes into play. In a last-ditch attempt to make Floyd feel wanted, Clark makes the Tiger Tiger profile on the DTF St. Louis app and throws a hit to Floyd, a.k.a. Rocksolid. Once again, Harbour’s performance proves to be the heart and soul of the show, equal parts devastating as he tells Clark how he’s felt “gone” since reaching the age of invisibility, and hilarious after he gets a hit from Tiger Tiger and talks about feeling seen again if he can give an honest dude an honest erection. Not exactly what Clark expected (though I suppose he should’ve anticipated Floyd might agree to a meetup, impressionable as he is), but his own unfulfilled desires to connect with his buddy and make him feel confident again lead him to follow through on a real-life encounter with the made-up Tiger Tiger. 

The actual scene of the Denny’s Plan, in which Clark visits a famously gay Denny’s while on a work trip in Chicago to entice a fine young gentleman to meet up with Floyd as Tiger Tiger, is where Bateman really shines this week. Steven Conrad’s joke writing for this show has a pretty weak hit ratio with me, but there’s always a combination of Conrad’s writing with a spot-on delivery that has me howling somewhere in each episode. This week, Bateman slayed me when he told the waiter at Denny’s that Floyd “helps the deaf” as a selling point for the proposition he’s talking circles around. The whole back-and-forth in which Clark tries an impromptu code-talk using Denny’s menu items on this poor kid also makes for the episode’s standout uncanny microcosm of male loneliness in the 21st century, only exacerbated by the confusion of the modern, gamified dating landscape. 

Also very effective: the timing of going through the whole proposition only to be turned down, then immediately greeted by Abbot Elementary’s Chris Perfetti, who had been listening from an adjacent booth the whole time. Perfetti agrees to play Tiger Tiger and meet up with Floyd, but gets cold feet once he follows Clark back to St. Louis and catches Floyd tweaking his quad on a jog in the park. “The Denny’s Plan” ends with a playful and ultimately tragic Abbot-and-Costello-style bit in which Clark and Floyd sign back and forth from a distance at the park. “You’re my best friend, and I love you,” signs Clark. “You should feel good about yourself.” But Floyd’s self-esteem is reaching an all-time low, having just watched the fake Tiger Tiger “nix” him from afar, leaving the emotionally ill-equipped Clark to resort to desperate measures to ensure a boner is popped for his bro. Tune in next week, where we finally see what’s popped, who pops it, and who is ultimately responsible for the death of Floyd Smernitch.