Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Starring: Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, David Harbour, Richard Jenkins, Joy Sunday, Arlan Ruf
Where to watch: HBO Plus/Jiohotstar (7 episodes, 1 hour each)
To watch or not to watch: A sex-positive dark comedy with a murder mystery to solve, which has good run till half and then runs out of material to show.

Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) is a weatherman with a small local channel with his face on the billboards of the city. He is assisted by Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) as an ASL interpreter. Once when reporting during a typhoon, Floyd saves Clark’s life and they grew closer together. Floyd invites Clark and his family to a cornhole party at his home, where they discuss their unfulfilled married lives, and the possibility of joining an app called DTF St. Louis (yes, it means exactly what you think it means). Clark meets Carol Love-Smernitch (Linda Cardellini) too, and on noticing her interest in him, flirts back leading to more things in the future. Carol pursues Clark, they start an affair, while Floyd tries his luck on the DTF app, ending up meeting men. The makers hint at things here which then they refute but hint again, so there might be something which more sofisticated viewers might be able to understand, but it is not clear to us mere mortals. In the parallel, we see Floyd being a super dad to his step son Richard (Arlan Ruf) who has some psychological and emotional issues which make his school life difficult. This, and Floyd poor financial choices of the past is making their lives difficult at home, giving him a sense of incompetency (and also in the mind of Carol until she sees him sign and dance at an R&B concert). Thanks to Carol’s manipulation and Clark’s guilt, he helps Floyd out.
This all comes to a head when Floyd is found murdered in suspicious circumstances at a community pool. Detective Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins) and Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) investigate the mystery, uncovering Clark and Carol as potential suspects. The rest of the series is about the investigation and the complicated web they wove when they practiced to deceive.

This series is ok. The first 4 episodes will make you come back for more – because they keep the intrigue alive and keep the viewers enough confused that there is an eagerness to get clarity. But when the episodes progress, you realise the reason you were confused was not because of lack of a puzzle piece of the story but because of the random and unnecessary convoluted storytelling, which does not help anyone but the length of the series, without which the series would have been 5 episodes long, easy. Each character of any prominence in the series has some idiosyncracy making it something straight out of Twilight Zone. They are also complex characters, with each person being a study of contradictions, which make them frustraingly human. The real star of the show are all the actors who have brought their A-game to the production. This is also a praise for the series and casting directors who have chosen the right people and crafting their characters so perfectly into this puzzle that they shine as individuals and also as a group. This goes as far as the supporting cast with Peter Sarsgaard as a gay guy who swiped right on Floyd on DTF app.

While the rating of the show here is not that great, there is something inheretly appealing about it which can one of its biggest winning factors – it has heart. Floyd is overall warm-hearted and genuinely nice guy who wants to help people. You see Clark as a helpful friend to Floyd, keeping his secrets and opening his life to him and Carol, which is less expected from a stereotypical weatherman who has his face plastered across the city. Carol is fighting her own battles, her own demons and dreams battling out her reality, who is conflicted by her emotions. It is real, lovable and believable. Where it loses is the storytelling which is very Nolan-esque in not a good way because it doesn’t have a complex concept behind it which can either convince or confuse the audience. So yea, watchable, but why.