As Steven Conrad‘s suburban murder mystery unravels on HBO, he’s reflecting on the real-life hookup app experiences that inspired him.
The DTF St. Louis creator explained that he was influenced by hookup apps that he saw “destroy the lives of some friends” going through middle age, much like the characters in the limited series, which airs Sundays at 6pm.
“I’m in my middle age, and most of my friends are too, and, somehow or another, it’s another phase of life where people make terrible decisions,” he told People. “The first one’s 14, and no one wants to live through that again.”
Conrad added, “But that same misguided, desperate need to fit in or to find someone to feel safe, it comes back around in middle age, and it can lead to bad decision-making. I had friends who were in that phase of life deciding to quit their jobs or leave their families.”
Noting he began conceiving the plot around 2018 when hookup apps “were probably at their height of popularity” thanks to the promise of “excitement without consequences,” Conrad added, “I had friends who were falling into that trap, and that just seemed like an unlikely bargain.”
Jason Bateman and David Harbour in ‘DTF St. Louis’
“I remember thinking, ‘This will go poorly.’ And ‘This will go poorly’ is one of the principles [of] my company, Elephant Pictures,” he said. “I love a show where you can go, ‘Okay, things are going to go poorly for these people who expect things to go well.’ And this idea of a hookup-only website for middle-aged people seemed to be exactly that.”
In DTF St. Louis, weatherman Clark (Jason Bateman), his colleague Floyd (David Harbour) and Floyd’s wife Carol (Linda Cardellini) end up in a love triangle that leads to one of them getting killed.
Conrad said Harbour, who was part of the project from the beginning, “came to me with this initial idea,” adding, “He had some different stories to assess and suggest that maybe we could set it here with these terms, with these characters.”
“We used this dating app idea that I was watching, destroy the lives of some friends, but taking David with me into this show to be one of the few leads, to be a person who was susceptible to this bad idea five years ago, but wouldn’t have done it 30 pounds ago, wouldn’t have done it one friendship earlier, wouldn’t have done it but in a phase of life now where he seems to need some volt of electricity to resuscitate him,” said Conrad.
