“DTF St. Louis” and the New Story of the Suburbs
From Critics at Large | The New Yorker by The New Yorker
April 2, 2026 · 48 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the new HBO miniseries 'DTF St. Louis' and its portrayal of suburban life and male psyche.
In the new HBO miniseries “DTF St. Louis,” Jason Bateman plays a weatherman living with his wife and kids in a sleepy town just outside of St. Louis. He befriends a coworker, Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), and the two sign up for a dating app that specializes in clandestine affairs. By the end of the first episode, Smernitch is dead. So begins a whodunnit set against the backdrop of suburban America and the discontents simmering beneath. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz survey how the setting has been used over the decades, from the films of Douglas Sirk and the stories of John Cheever in the nineteen-fifties and sixties to the fantasy of that era seen in 1985’s “Back to the Future.” Today, the locale is being assessed anew. Like “DTF,” the recent docuseries “ Neighbors ” strips the suburbs of their glamour, focussing instead on petty grievances and property disputes. “They are small stakes, but of course, everything that is quintessentially American—property, the right to violence, the right to protect land—are all intensely operative in this space,” Cunningham says. “And if something goes wrong, somebody pays for it.”…
People in this episode
Host: Vinson Cunningham
Guests: Naomi Fry, Alexandra Schwartz
Topics covered
- suburban America
- whodunnit
- cultural assessment
- male psyche
- property disputes
- American values
Keywords
- DTF St. Louis
- suburbs
- Jason Bateman
- David Harbour
- whodunnit
- American culture
- property rights
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: HBO
Books & works: DTF St. Louis, Neighbors, The Swimmer, Wifey, Back to the Future
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