U DTF?

Don't let the title fool you, as it did me.

If you don’t know, “DTF” stands for “down to fuck.” Had the new HBO miniseries been called anything else, I probably would have given it a shot sooner. Not that I’m opposed to crassness—that would be rich coming from someone who once deep-throated Mrs. Claus’s monster cock for a comedy sketch—but the title was enough to make my eyes slide right past it on the menu.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a piece for the Wall St. Journal comparing three new shows about rich, middle-aged white dudes in crisis. That piece comes out online this weekend and then in print the following weekend. DTF St. Louis was one of the shows, and I did not have high hopes for it. I was wrong. It’s one of my favorite television experiences of the last decade.

It’s a tough show to write about without giving away the plot, but my love for the show has little to do with the story, which is compelling, and everything to do with the show’s depiction of male friendship.

Jason Bateman and David Harbour play men in middle-age who meet and fall in deep, unreserved, platonic love. How they do, and why they do, is best left for viewing, but what stands out about the show is the rich portrayal of male sensitivity, vulnerability, and how those more “feminine” attributes reveal the hidden strengths of men struggling to live in a world whose shine has worn away.

We’ve seen depictions of cinematic male love before. There’s no Butch Cassidy without the Sundance Kid. And it’s Bad Boys, not Bad Boy. What distinguishes the men from DTF is their willingness to reveal their deepest selves to the other in ways that would be unthinkable for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s characters. (Ok, here I have to confess that I have not seen any of the Bad Boys movies, so maybe I’m wrong.) These are men living the prescription for how we’re told an evolved modern male ought to live. The result is equal parts beautiful, hilarious, cringe-worthy, pathetic, and inspiring.

David Harbour as Floyd Smernitch. Photo by Tina Rowden/HBO

Contrast this with the manosphere’s exuberant misogyny, aggression, and testicle-crushing trousers. The Andrew Tates and Jake Pauls of the world shoveling mountains of shit to young men who equate money with happiness and confuse sex with intimacy.

At long last, the culture appears poised to struggle with the problems of men. I say “poised” because, while we see the conversations slowly dripping into the mainstream, the issues surrounding contemporary manhood (underperforming girls in school and in the workplace, decreasing life expectancy, loneliness) have yet to reach the men most in need of hearing them.

In my own book on the subject, A Better Man: A (Mostly) Serious Letter to My Son, I wrote that this work is likely to be generational. The women’s movement took 200 years to come to full flower. I don’t think we need quite that long for men, owing largely to the work women have already done (thanks, ladies!), but I expect it take at least 50.

When I wrote the book a few years ago, I said that I didn’t even think the work had begun. Now, with the daily demonstration of everything we don’t want men to be coming from the White House, I suspect more people are at least primed – poised, if you prefer - to be receptive to new ideas.

One of those ideas took the form of DTF St. Louis. Whether more men will take their cues from David Harbour’s hip-hop American sign language interpreter character, Floyd Smernitch, I don’t know. Probably not. But what’s important isn’t the specifics of the relationship. What matters is that the show models a kind of male closeness that we don’t see enough of.

In fact, I can’t recall seeing it before. Not on TV and not in life. Not in an America in which a 2021 American Perspectives study found that 15% of men have “no close friendships at all”.

I know this as well as anybody. For all my high-minded talk on the subject, I’m just as walled-off as most other dudes. I’m more comfortable keeping things surface, sarcastic. Less willing to reveal myself to other men than I am with women. I have to work to maintain my male friendships and often find myself falling short.

Men are struggling. I don’t expect the women in our lives to feel sorry for us. What I find myself in need of, far more than pity, is inspiration. I need men modeling the kind of behavior and relationships I want to see. I need to see what it looks like when men confess their full selves to other men. To see what supportive, non-competitive friendship looks like. To see what masculinity looks like divorced from the toxicity too often associated with it, even when it flails. Even when it ends up biting you in the ass. For that reason, I am as in need of what DTF St. Louis has to offer as the men for whom I write today.