If HBO’s latest whodunnit DTF St. Louis was a murder mystery novel, you’d be tempted to turn to the last page. If it was based on a true story, you’d be on that Wikipedia page with a quickness digging for spoilers. The series, which puts David Harbour, Jason Bateman, and Linda Cardellini in a twisted love triangle, is so true crime-y that it feels ripped from the headlines. But is it?
DTF St. Louis is the unsettling, darkly comic story of multiple affairs gone wrong. What starts as a platonic meet-cute between an ASL interpreter named Floyd (Harbour) and a local weather man named Clark (Bateman) who happens to be having an affair with his wife Carol (Cardellini).
As the two men get closer, Clark encourages Floyd to download a hook-up app called “DTF St. Louis” and have some no-strings extra-marital fun of his own. Some time later, Floyd is found dead outside a pool house and Clark is arrested for murder.
The show’s origin story is complicated
Originally, DTF St. Louis was an adaptation of a 2017 New Yorker article titled "My Dentist's Murder Trial: Adultery, False Identities, and a Lethal Sedation" by James Lasdun–an executive producer on the HBO series. The piece detailed the true story of Dr. Gilberto Nunez, a dentist in Hudson Valley, New York, and how he was indicted for the murder of his friend Thomas Kolman in 2011.
The prosecutors claimed that Nunez was having an affair with Kolman’s wife and killed him to “get him out of the way,” while also going to extreme lengths to get her to leave him. The real murder trial happened in 2015, and while Nunez was ultimately acquitted on second degree murder charges, he was found guilty of felony forgery and did serve time. He was released on parole in 2022.
In the New Yorker article, Lasdun details how he got Nunez (who was actually his dentist) to tell him his side of the story. Nunez confirmed that he was having an affair with Kolman’s wife, Linda. According to him, she was hesitant to leave her husband. So he bought a burner phone and texted Kolman, pretending to be a concerned woman named Samantha, and told him about the affair. According to Nunez, that admission ultimately brought all three of them closer until, of course, the husband was found dead outside of a gym.
According to Variety, Harbour was set to play Kolman, and Pedro Pascal (!) was cast as Nunez. When the latter dropped out of the project–presumably because he had to star in every single 2025 and 2026 movie–the script underwent some changes. Lasdun is still an executive producer on the series. Bateman joined the cast as the other half. The show is still technically about a guy who 1) was accused of murdering a friend, 2) was having an affair with his wife, and, 3) impersonated a fictional person via social media. For the most part, however, this is an entirely new story.
There are some other stray details that the show and the article have in common. For example: Kolman was found with his pants unzipped and Nunez assumed the judge was going to claim they were having an affair. Kolman, like his eventual fictional counterpart, had created an account on a hook-up website. Without giving too much away, DTF St. Louis takes a different route with regards to its characters’ sexuality.
The IRL inspiration is really just horniness
At the end of the day, the writers and producers were more interested in telling a dark coming-of-age story about people who are married but feel anything but “settled” in an existential, romantic, or sexual sense.
In an interview with People the show’s creator Steven Conrad said that centering the narrative around a hook-up app was inspired by his own inner circle. “That idea that there could be excitement without consequences,” Conrad said. “I had friends who were falling into that trap, and that just seemed like an unlikely bargain.”
He describes it like experiencing a second adolescence: “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.” He worked with Harbour to develop the series at its initial true crime phase and at its current and ultimate suburban mystery phase. Thus, DTF St. Louis was born. The only bad news? We have no way to predict how this is all going to go down.
