Starting in 2017, Bateman played Marty Byrde, an accountant turned cash launderer for a ruthless Mexican cartel, in “Ozark,” arguably his signature role. The show is lit in wan grays and murky browns—this has, over the years, become an irritating Netflix cliché, but, in the case of “Ozark,” the coloristic choice really works. Marty becomes the proprietor of a funeral home and a riverboat casino, both fronts that can’t hold for long, placing him in the middle of a conflict between the Mexicans and the local criminals near the Lake of the Ozarks, in Missouri, a whole social panorama away from his family’s former home in Chicago. “Ozark” is about how putatively regular people can get caught up in currents much stronger than they know, how Batemanian sangfroid can cloak a quotidian sociopathy that only grows as bloody trouble grows, too. It also, in an insightful way, recasts the relationship between white-collar work and underworld crime. Sometimes what the cartel needs most is a guy who’s a whiz with a spreadsheet.
“DTF St. Louis,” a new comic whodunnit on HBO, is a strange, surreal, surpassingly dark addition to Bateman’s œuvre. He’s cast well in the show—I can’t imagine it working without his presence, reeking of ennui and buried impulses. He plays Clark Forrest (that’s Michael, Marty, and Clark, for those keeping track; so many swatches of khaki-colored, all-American nomenclature), a TV weatherman living in a St. Louis suburb. He rides a dorky recumbent bike to work; he bought one for his wife, but she won’t use it. The marriage is beige, just like the town, and just like Clark’s life.
At work, while reporting near a looming tornado, Clark meets Floyd (played with a touching, funny pathos by David Harbour), a sign-language interpreter. Floyd lives on a lower rung of the town’s hierarchy than Clark. He doesn’t have as much money, his formerly buff body (he used to pose for Playgirl) has gone bulky and soft, he’s got the taxman on his ass, and his rock-throwing stepson gives him only grudging respect. Still, Clark and Floyd get along. They’re both uncomfortable in their lives and looking, somewhat desperately, to spice things up.
Soon, Clark finds a dating app emphasizing discretion, called DTF St. Louis, which he shares with Floyd. (It’s reminiscent of the app Ashley Madison, that infamous watering hole for lonely married folks, whose names were exposed in a 2015 leak.) But before we learn too much about how their dates might go, or whether they’re even able to snag some, we discover that Clark has been carrying on an affair with Floyd’s wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), and Floyd turns up dead, surrounded by his own pinups and a can of laced Bloody Mary.
“DTF” is even odder than you may think. Its characters speak in repetitive, often childish phrases that sound as though they belong to much younger people, possibly elementary-school children playacting at bored adulthood. “I fuckin’ love it and stuff,” one lover says to another, confirming her enthusiasm for their tryst. People make big deals about their favorite Jamba Juice concoctions, and take many beats too long to arrive at the understanding that “DTF” does in fact stand for “down to fuck.” Certain passages in the fiction of Jane Bowles read like this. You might conclude that the show is an experimentalist exercise in rummaging through the brain matter of the median suburban American, connecting each of that specimen’s furtive actions and veiled desires to the immutable psyche of a permanent child.
In a chapter of Susan Cheever’s latest book, “When All the Men Wore Hats”—which cunningly explicates the writing of Cheever’s father, John—the stories “The Five-Forty-Eight” and “The Country Husband” get grouped together as suburban horror shows running on sexual energies. “Both these stories carefully paint the pastel watercolors of the suburbs,” Susan Cheever writes. “Both stories run on the energy of illicit sex and unwanted desires, and both end up in shame for the men who feel these desires.”