HBO DTF
Suburban Sexual Ennui
Uncanny is the fresh banger that rocked me through Parkdale this am, from jam room bunkmates and TO rock stars Ace of Wands, and yes that is some violin there, there’s always room for ultra-violins. Their new album, Future Wave, plays beautifully from opener Dark River to the coda, Spiral Woman. I call their style canadien dramatique.
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I’ve been watching TV, serving a corporate agenda that deactivates the individual from resistance, after employing my mind and body all day every fucking day it releases me into a world of passive playtime. It’s that thing you do until you can’t anymore.
I’ve been watching TV since I was born. In the seventies there was serious criticism of TV; we found out we were not watching it, it was watching us, and it wasn’t even 1984 yet, and we learned the thing being sold wasn’t the Charmin’ endorsed by the nice lady on the boob tube whose job was to keep her suburban paradise stocked with enough toilet paper to ride out a pandemic, no, the thing being sold was US (see also the fine if uneven movie of the same name from the excellent Jordan Peele, with its nasty double-entendre signaling the richest country in North America), we were being sold to advertisers and like social media, the idea was to keep you in front of it, unless it was PBS which built into its programming dullness as an act of social responsibly.
On the TV I am watching is men. It’s uncanny. I got the hockey on, and what a gift to Habsland last night; you bet there was sex with jerseys after that game (no honey, leave that on, I’m pretending you’re Slafkovsky) and the hockey is a traditional performance, a band of brothers assembled through corporate trading to show off and beat the shit out of a team an alien would find impossible to differentiate if it wasn’t for the jerseys, and later have beer together with the money they just earned selling your eyeballs to Molson. It’s a sound arrangement. Chips?
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The first time I saw HBO was in a motel in Lake George, New York. It was the late seventies.
HBO was the idea that you could skip selling the audience to an advertiser and just ask for the money up front like a movie theatre. You want this show, pay me.
Their first big hit was Tony Soprano running a strip joint and having people killed and fantasizing about his therapist, Lorraine Bracco, and that was the twist, the orange in the old fashioned, here was a guy hard boiled as Chernobyl on a bad day whose Clark Kent is a suburban Dad with panic attacks. So it was about the 80s.
The new HBO show, DTF St. Louis -because you gotta have fresh bangers leeches like Next Play use for content, we are the sticky fish on the shark- I watched on my couch seventy-five inches from a fifty-five-inch OLED. DTF stands for Don’t Touch Friends (that’s not what it stands for – ed.) (still, something there – ed.). It has actors who compel audiences using a tv remote like a mouse cycling through a hundred quintillion shows to click on it and then the show starts like you just realized all your clothes are off and foreplay is not on the otherwise infinite menu.
Jason Bateman and David Harbour become friends in middle age which it’s what most entertainment is about now; a pithy quote from a critic about living Ken doll Ryan Gosling’s Hail Mary: Men can have friends, but only in the event of global apocalypse.
Down To Fuck St. Louis is a genre; suburban sexual ennui. Through sips of a 2024 Tempranillo from my attorney’s handmade ceramic tumbler, I thought of Alan Ball’s American Beauty (early Sam Mendes!) and Todd Field’s movie of Tom Perrotta’s novel, Little Children. Movies are now episodic pay-tv.
One of HBO’s best shows ever is the first season of Gen Xer Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective, about a coupla guys who are wicked complicated. It has menstream (not a word now a word) actors Matthew McConaughey and Next Play fave Woody Harrelson. These bad motherfuckers are the duality of man personified. McConaughey lives in his nihilistic head and Harrelson lives through his private dick. His wife is hot, his affairs are centerfold grade, and dude is his own downfall but what a way to go.
These unlikely chums come together to solve grisly murders in the bayou and that, dear solitary reader, is the Stanley Cup of elevator pitches; it gave the executive who greenlit this overheated potboiler an erection she did not know she was capable of.
They can’t be friends, but give them a common goal, in this case stop a guy from killing women and dressing them like tree animals in a religious horror story (see under: the bible) and they will overcome their differences and maybe share a few laughs along the way.
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The woman lurking inside DTF St. Louis is Linda Cardellini, the fetching wife of Harbour, a big loveable mensch too concerned about other people’s feelings. She’s the passive aggressive interlocutor between the guys so their friendship can blossom behind the suburban curtain. The show is about guys, ok men (the feminists have stolen guys!) and relationships, but to keep us streaming it has all kinds of plot, so Next Play will not be dropping spoilers, the concept of spoiler designed to pique your prurient curiosity.
The show is carefully written and studiously directed by Gen Xer Steven Conrad in a mood both compelling and tedious, familiar to readers of any Substack. DTF (Drive To Finland) also showcases another masterclass in character acting from Peter Sarsgaard; Next Play loves guys good at what they do.
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As long as there are men there will be stories about them. It’s where the real money is. There are two directors whose films open to massive box office on IMAX screens; Nolan and Villeneuve. They don’t make chick flicks. Hail Mary and The Martian are literally guys alone in space. Creed builds on a franchise about guys punching each other to death.
Last week I sit in the barber’s chair of my exceptional hairdresser Steve (find him at Barberella on Dundas). In between our usual conversations about Blade Runner and math rock prog bands (he’s a drummer!) he mentions a client complained there are no more shows about regular guys.
I would laugh but there’s a pair scissors near my head.
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STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK for the story of the night in the motel with HBO.
BOX OFFICE
· HBO opened in 1972 with a hockey game, Canucks and Rangers.
· Woody showed up in HBO’s White House Plumbers, an excellent pay-tv adjunct to All the President’s Men.
· Not All the President’s People, amirite?
· And they thought that administration was “not very bright guys”. We always go to eleven.
REALLY IMPORTANT BOOK
· Way more important than anything else here, Maggie Helwig’s Encampment wins 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
CALL THE POLICE
· In an event of synchronicity with last night, this is on at Larry’s. This goes out to Boss. Wishing un excellent parcours à Paris!
· Actually, you coulda called True Detective, Kings of Pain.