Everything You Need to Know About Jason Bateman’s Character In ‘DTF: St. Louis’ You Learn in the First 30 Seconds of the Show

Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman) says goodbye to his kids, high-fives his wife, then pedals away on his recumbent bike, past a billboard of himself as the weatherman for the local news station. That’s the very first thing you see in HBO’s new series DTF: St. Louis, and it’s one of the best, most concise character introductions I’ve ever seen. It tells you everything you need to know about Clark, from his lukewarm marriage to the fact that he’s on the spectrum. No, not the autistic spectrum. The suck spectrum.

Clark sucks. We don’t know precisely how, yet - what specific flavor of suck he is - but the premiere episode’s later revelations hardly come as a surprise. When he tells Floyd (David Harbour) about the titular app that helps you “spice it up” by connecting you with commitment-free extramarital sex, I wanted to roll my eyes. It just… sounded exactly like something a recumbent biker would say. Not just the cheating part, but the spice bit. The way he makes it sound so aspirational, while simultaneously hiding his confession to his friend while sitting on his children’s swing set. Even the fact that he wants to share this experience with his friend is sus, as if convincing Floyd to join him on this spice adventure will normalize it or halve his shame somehow.

Before I watched DTF: St. Louis, I’d never given much thought to reclined cycling as a personality trait, and realistically, I harbor no ill will toward its aficionados. Cardio exercise that’s gentle on the joints is a good thing! So why did it immediately leave a bad taste in my mouth? I workshopped this argument on Podjiba this week, and I think the reason is that they’re ostentatious. With price tags in the thousands, not just any joint-sensitive cyclist can own one, which means standing out is both inevitable and, I imagine, the point. Otherwise, you’d just get a recumbent exercise bike for a couple hundo and stay home. They’re not for transport, they’re for being noticed while travelling. Clark’s bike even has a jaunty little flag and two water bottles on display, and yet his helmet is so loosely clasped it may as well be a bandana. The specificity of those details, the performative safety of it all, is pitch-perfectly unserious.

Clark, by the way, is the only person in the St. Louis area to buy a recumbent bike, and in fact, he bought two, which becomes a whole plot point as the show shifts from suburban drama to murder mystery. And that brings me to the second reason Clark toodling around on his little recumbent bike is a brilliant character introduction: it both telegraphs that he sucks and also that he couldn’t possibly be a murderer. By the end of the premiere, Clark is in police custody for the poisoning of Floyd, and yet after the first 30 seconds we, the audience, know he’s innocent. Not just because it would be a pretty boring show if the first suspect was the killer, but because… Why would a man so unwilling to aggravate his knees risk hard time? Why would a guy so used to garnering attention do something he wouldn’t want to be identified for?

Sure, I bet Clark didn’t do it because that would be too obvious, from a story structure point of view, but mostly it’s because that’s not his flavor of suck. I just don’t think recumbent cyclists are on the “murder sucking” end of the suck spectrum, although I’ll admit I haven’t given this issue an enormous amount of thought. Maybe the show will throw us a curve and prove that Clark used his daring nature to navigate traffic from a comfortable position and to plan the perfect crime.