Big spectacular images and keenly observed human emotions don’t clash, they harmonize. When your television show juxtaposes nuanced depictions of love and lust with grand-scale visuals that cause the viewer to ooh and ahh in awe, it makes an implicit connection between the two. Those feelings may be trapped inside two or three human beings, but the magic of cinema allows them to be represented on camera in allegorical form anyway.
Industry and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, to name two shows of recent vintage, both do this in very different ways: Industry through druggy nightlife psychedelia and ostentatious Kubrickian shot compositions, Monarch through, well, King Kong and Godzilla. But I can’t think of a show that’s explored sexuality with the frankness of the former or romance with the rapture of the latter. (No, seriously, the King Kong/Godzilla show is romantic as hell.) Industry’s “Blinded by the Lights” London vistas and Monarch’s colossal monster attacks visually represent the emotional stakes.
Unlikely though it may seem, creator-writer-director Steven Conrad’s black comedy about a trio of middle-aged Missourians and the bizarre love triangle that left one of them dead with his beer gut exposed can be added to the list. DTF St. Louis is quickly emerging as one of the most thoughtfully shot shows on TV this year, utilizing brutalist architecture and expressionist lighting and shot compositions to create the sense that something massive is happening, even if it’s just about a bunch of horny people catching feelings and getting killed in a Dateline NBC sort of way.
I reviewed this week’s DTF St. Louis for Decider.
Tags: decider, dtf st. louis, TV, TV reviews