“Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name, because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star.” 

Reading these words changed my life. I was a sophomore in college and very much arrayed against any kind of mainstream music when I happened to pick up the loose liner notes for a Barry White best-of compilation one of my roommates had lying around. All my life disco had represented everything cheesy and plastic about popular music — until I read what Barry said.

Suddenly it all clicked for me. What used to come across as phony about disco now felt to me like the utmost sincerity. Love really is that powerful. Dancing really is that wonderful. The night really is that magical. Disco is designed to make you feel good things in as big a way as possible. It makes you beautiful.

This revelation opened up a mind that had been closed to vast swathes of artistic expression. It also made me just about lose my mind when DTF St. Louis writer/director/creator Steven Conrad selected my favorite Barry White song, “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby,” to soundtrack the climactic underwear-only dance party between Clark Forrest and Floyd Smernitch. I’m serious, I threw my hands up in the air so fast I spilled a beverage. I love this music. As it turns out, I think I love these men, too.

I reviewed the finale of DTF St. Louis, an extraordinary show and one of the year’s best, for Decider.

DTF St. Louis takes three real goofballs, gives them complicated and unhappy lives, and sits back as they throw themselves at each other in various combinations, hoping that one of them sets off the chain reaction that will free them from their unhappiness. It feels increasingly tragic, knowing that they failed.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of DTF St. Louis for Decider.

What Floyd Smernitch, Clark Forrest, and Carol Love-Smernitch had together is a hard thing to categorize, and each new revelation makes it even harder. This episode of DTF St. Louis sees our intrepid investigators Donahue Homer (amazing name) and Jodie Plumb dig deeper into the nature of this unusual arrangement, while flashbacks show us things even the detectives don’t yet know. The result is a portrait of people who grow more interesting to look at by the week.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of DTF St. Louis for Decider.

At the end of the day, Carol is sitting exhausted in the backyard when Floyd comes over to tell her the umpire outfit is a turnoff. Then the landscapers that Floyd promised to cancel because they can no longer afford them show up, leaf blowers roaring. The tears that were already flowing from Carol’s eyes devolve into full-blown sobbing. She can’t count on this man for anything. Do nice guys finish last? Who can say — but the women who marry them sure do, from where Carol is sitting. The overall effect of the scene is like watching someone get punched, hard, while they’re already down for the count.

All this happens before the opening titles. It’s a knockout cold open, one which takes the drama’s least sympathetic character and reframes the story from her perspective. Now we see why the officious, mendacious, successful, put-together Clark seemed like not just a breath of fresh air but an actual lifeline for Carol, and why lovable loser Floyd was only sporadically lovable where Carol is concerned. 

And this is just one of several truly masterful sequences in this episode, which moves from strength to strength. 

I reviewed this week’s DTF St. Louis for Decider.

“Floyd was wonderful.” Clark Forrest is insistent on this point. He says so twice, one time adding “and I would never hurt him.” Why? Because he loved him. He loved him “like the sun when you’re cold, water when you really need water.” He loved him more than he loved Carol. “Floyd was wonderful.”

And you know what? He was. If this episode of DTF St. Louis establishes nothing else, it makes it clear that Floyd Smernitch was, in fact, wonderful. Time and again, in circumstance after circumstance, his foremost concern, really his only concern, is making life better for people. Which he did, for a lot of people, Clark Forrest included.

I reviewed this week’s DTF St. Louis for Decider.

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.

I suspect that whether you’re interested in the answer depends on how much the dry vibe Conrad conjures here resonates with you. From Floyd’s restrictive clothing to Clark’s pinched smile, from Plumb’s crisp professionalism even when talking about her and her husband’s porn use to Homer’s mausoleum of a police station, there’s an austere air to the proceedings here, as darkly comic and motivated by sexual desire as they are. 

This isn’t to say the show never goes for broad jokes; Carol’s umpire outfit and Floyd’s lack of Batman reading comprehension are pretty damn broad. It’s simply to say that there’s a welcome chilliness to the proceedings, one that cuts against the comedy of the title. Fittingly, Conrad frequently keeps each of the key figures isolated in the frame — except Floyd and Clark, whom he puts together over and over again, from that convenience store to a restroom in an Outback Steakhouse. It makes moments like the footage of Floyd performing ASL translations for some kind of pop act stand out all the more for their exuberance.

So what will it take to sever the two men’s connection? And to what degree is Carol a proxy for a relationship between Clark and the man who saved his life — who several flash-forwards or flashbacks or whatever they are show embracing, shirtless? Whodunit is one thing. Whydunit is where the good stuff can be found.

I’m covering the dark comedy DTF St. Louis for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s good!