The original post: /r/television by /u/Designy on 2026-04-19 15:21:18+00:00.

It’s not good… it’s great. But I think it was made for a specific audience. People my age (I’m 43). It is a show about the new middle age and it just nails it beat for mother-loving beat.

I went into DTF skeptical mostly because of the 15 second forced-preview that was looping while I frantically looked for the fucking remote that I am somehow able to constantly hide from myself (It was in the bathroom). The ads for it made it look like a whimsical dark comedy with an aged-up David Harbour exploring his fat Thor phase.

But Bateman and Jenkins seem to be picky about roles so out of an imagined friendship with them I gave it a try. I did it for the Bate (dumb).

THE SETUP

Harbour and Bateman are two guys who get paired up at the news station they work at to do the weatherman trope of standing in the middle of a hurricane to report that it is a hurricane. Bateman is a charismatic and beloved weatherman local-Roker type whose face adorns Billboards in the city. Harbour is a sign language interpreter. They are two men who have fallen on opposite sides of the now dissolved middle class.

They both hold an awkward professionalism as they prepare to get the shot, but during the filming a loose signpost comes whipping at them. In this moment Harbour “saves” Batemen. I put it in quotes because it’s not like a bus was hurtling towards him or something. He just kind of reacted by shielding him a little.

But what follows is a cut to the two men in a convenience store immediately following the incident. They have that manic energy of two kids who just outran the mall security guard, relieved and panicked at the same time. After each insisting it was the other who was the real MVP of the event they do the white guy high-five which is where one guy goes for the Handshake while the other goes for the pound-it, then reverse, and then just end up grasping each others hands. And spidering each others fingers in a slightly embarrassed but sincere way.

And my words do not even do this scene Netflix-summary-levels of justice, because it’s handled masterfully by these two actors. You get immediately lost in their relationship in a way that want to be lost in friendship.

Words like “bromance” and “brolationship” have done to this longing the same way that all modern day portmanteaus and meme culture slang do to anything; it turns it into a one word joke that we all tell each other for a week

“oh man, I heard this great term ‘Bed rotting’, lol”.

Unaware of the fact that to define something in terms of its most embarrassing and humorous qualities is to diminish it in the most powerful and reductive way. The truth is men need this connection and it is a connection the show defines for us in a way we know to be true in the same way we know that being Michael Phelps in 2009 was the most awesome thing a person could experience, we haven’t experienced it but the truth is intrinsic.

And that’s just the first 5 minutes.

The show unfolds over 7 episodes and I promise it will subvert your expectation at every turn. Because the show does not reach for the narrative highs and lows, but instead seeks to find the deepest truths within its characters, each of whom represent an exaggerated archetype of these new middle-ages, where suffering is not born from wants and needs, but from fear and shame. To die of being exposed is a greater fear than death from exposure.

Whenever DTF introduces a character the writers are giving you just enough information to allow you to liberally fill in the gaps with your judgements and biases. It knows you will judge fully their measure from a handful of their actions, e.g A wife shutting down her husband as he excitedly tells her that he has found his passion in life. An aged detective who follows protocols from a Dashiel Hammett serial being paired with a young woman detective. A man who is just a “little too good… like no one is that good”.

All archetypes that we have seen a thousand times but never from such a well-framed angle.

And it shows you not just one additional angle, but dozens. And this process has an interesting effect; it doesn’t alter your assumptions, it impotentizes (couldn’t find the right word here, roll with it) them.

And by the end of it all… well, without spoiling it, you watch 3 people make decisions that range from reasonable to much less-than all of which conclude in their destruction. And if you pay attention then you will see this is not a morality play, but instead an object lesson of a greater truth, one that speaks to the true existential crisis we experience as we find ourselves as the new generation of the world’s “adults”.

Simply put, we don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to act, how to love, when to sacrifice and when to place boundaries. The only roadmap most of us have used is to not make the “same mistakes of our parents”

I tell my kids I love them constantly. I hug my 18 year old son any chance I get and kiss his forehead. But every time I do all I think about is my own childhood and never receiving those things. We spoil our children because we remember the pain of being deprived. We validate them for who they and the truths they claim because we felt unseen. Reaction got us part of the way, but the lives we now live require action

And we are learning the hard way that the dismantling of an institution is just that. The same way that demolition is only 10% of a bathroom remodel. And now we are the adults. And the world is different in a way that no one planned for and holds no foundational truths or beliefs. All we know how to do is to tell other people they are wrong, that their map is made in error, that the dragons are actually there.

But we all agree that it’s not… right. Not well. Not human.

And now we’re the captain.

This is not a spoiler, but the show is summed up at the end with a very simple line from Bateman during a tragic moment:

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I think I’m just lonely…”

Ok, I have more to write but at this point it’s going to devolve into armchair—intellectual and I just want to recommend it and thank the creators and actors for such a masterful piece of modern television.

Watch the show, I hope it connects with you the way it did for me.