David Harbour spent the better part of a decade in Hawkins, Indiana, and it was reasonable to wonder what shape his career would take once that chapter closed. Jim Hopper made him a household name, but the shadow of a role that big has swallowed plenty of careers, and Harbour’s swings outside Stranger Things, from Hellboy to Violent Night to his Red Guardian appearances for Marvel, mostly traded on variations of the same gruff-but-lovable persona.
The stronger possibility may always have been that his most interesting post-Stranger Things work would come from something smaller, stranger, and less obviously commercial, and that seems to be more or less what happened. His first major series after leaving the Upside Down, DTF St. Louis, premiered on HBO on March 1, and this month it has returned to HBO Max’s global top 10. For anyone who bounced off the title, which is understandable, the series comes from Steven Conrad, the writer-director behind Patriot, one of the most quietly worshiped cult shows of the last decade.
The Emmy-Winning HBO Series Is Back in the Streaming Top 10
In DTF St. Louis, Harbour plays Floyd Smernitch, a sign language interpreter and devoted stepdad who strikes up a friendship with Jason Bateman’s local weatherman Clark, unaware that Clark is sleeping with his wife Carol, played by Linda Cardellini. Floyd turns up dead early in the first episode, and the show spends its run doubling back through time as two mismatched detectives, Richard Jenkins and Wednesday’s Joy Sunday, pick apart what happened.
That’s a fairly standard dead-body mystery, but Conrad’s version filters it through the suburban melancholy and deadpan strangeness he honed on Patriot, and the title itself refers to a hookup app for restless married people that sits at the center of the mess. Critics mostly embraced the series from the start, with the season landing in the high 80s on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert described it as “wickedly entertaining” and “an addictive watch,” while also arguing that Bateman delivers some of his best work in years.
‘DTF St. Louis’ Is Giving David Harbour the Breakout He Needed
DTF St. Louis walked away from this month’s Primetime Emmys with seven wins, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, plus acting trophies for Harbour and Cardellini. There’s a small irony worth noting there, since Harbour earned multiple Emmy nominations for Stranger Things over the years and never won, and it took an ASL interpreter to finally get him over the line. The awards run has evidently sent a new wave of subscribers back to the show, which now sits seventh on HBO Max’s global chart as of Sept. 19, more than five months after its finale aired and in the company of current originals like Lanterns that have fresh episodes doing the heavy lifting.
