'DTF St. Louis' Finale Recap: Who Killed Floyd?

Courtesy of HBO

SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains plot details from “No One’s Normal. It Just Looks That Way from Across the Street,” the series finale of “DTF St. Louis,” now streaming on HBO Max.

“DTF St. Louis” is not a conventional murder mystery, and its April 12 finale did not deliver a conventional conclusion. The HBO limited series spent seven episodes investigating the death of Missouri ASL interpreter Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), who was found dead after drinking a poisoned Bloody Mary in the Kevin Kline Community Pool Center. (Fun fact: Kline is a St. Louis native!) Over seven episodes, detectives Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) circled a few likely suspects: Floyd’s best friend, local weatherman Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), who was having an affair with Floyd’s wife Carol (Linda Cardellini); Carol, who’d just taken out a seven-figure life insurance policy for Floyd — and even Floyd’s stepson Richard (Arlan Ruf), a socially awkward pre-teen with a history of violent outbursts.

Well before the finale itself, viewers of “DTF St. Louis” already knew its central love triangle defied easy categorization. In more ways than one, Clark and Carol weren’t alone in their infidelity. Clark and Floyd had initially bonded over the show’s namesake app, a means for married people to meet discreet new partners; Floyd, too, had met up with potential paramours like Modern Love (Peter Sarsgaard), the online pseudonym of a local roller rink owner. But Floyd was also aware of Clark and Carol’s connection. In fact, he encouraged it, recognizing the toll the couple’s chronic lack of intimacy had taken on them both. Sometimes, Floyd even watched.

To creator Steven Conrad, “DTF St. Louis” was about something more profound and less tawdry than romantic jealousy: the loneliness and disappointment of reaching midlife and not liking what you find. “You can’t tell anybody what is really hurting,” Conrad tells Variety. “You can only pretend like some trivial things might help.” There’s no one person to blame for this condition, except maybe oneself. And so it is with Floyd’s death, Joy and Donoghue come to realize: he dosed the Bloody Mary and drank it knowing what would happen, using his final moments to sign “I love you” to a horrified Richard, who’s come to the poolhouse, unknowingly, just as his stepfather has made his fateful choice.

Despite — or perhaps because of — this undercurrent of depression, “DTF St. Louis” also revels in off-kilter humor, from the slapstick of Cardellini in an umpire outfit (it’s Carol’s side hustle) to made-up slang like “voo,” a shorthand for “rendezvous.” The resolution of the show’s other primary mystery epitomized this blend of hilarious and sad. One contributing factor to Floyd and Carol’s dry spell was a penis deformity Floyd explained to Clark with a long, drawn-out story of a job interview in Chicago. But after several feints, including multiple traffic accidents, the injury’s origins were far more mundane: Richard, whose biological father was abusive, snapped after seeing Carol and Floyd argue. “DTF St. Louis” invokes the absurd, yet its characters’ actions are rooted in ordinary, universal emotions.

Conrad broke down the fitting end, singular tone and haunting final shot of “DTF St. Louis” in a wide-ranging interview. Read on for the rest of our conversation.

Courtesy of HBO

After building up the murder mystery over seven episodes, we ultimately learn there is no murder at all. How did you want the reveal of what happened to Floyd to add to the audience’s understanding of this character?

If you’ll recall, the first time we meet Floyd, it’s not the tornado where he meets Clark. It’s at the therapy session with Richard, where he’s struggling to make this connection. And he mentions to his stepson that he’s concerned that he’s going to grow up and have a life that amounts to the way he characterizes as getting “grown-up Cs.” What he means by that is that he’s afraid that Richard is going to suffer from profound loneliness. Over the course of trying to solve what seems to be a murder mystery, we watch them connect. Their relationship has become stabilized, and then becomes destabilized — catastrophically destabilized — by impulsive decisions that were made to try to soothe some pain on his part.

I guess I would hope that the audience has come to know him over the seven hours, and that this event feels sad, obviously, but foreseeable due to the conditions of this one summer where the only bright spot was this singular friendship that didn’t amount to ultimately be enough for hi