What ‘DTF St. Louis’ Reveals About America’s Loneliness Crisis
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(OPINION) My wife Liz and I recently watched HBO’s “DTF St. Louis,” a 2026 comedy-drama-mystery that’s been nominated for 13 Emmys, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.
Both of us were struck by the show’s artistic excellence, but also by its main characters’ pervasive loneliness, despair and nihilism. The story is fiction, but it accurately portrays a real-life malaise afflicting legions of contemporary Americans. It made my soul ache.
In an era when so many Americans have increasingly turned away from religion and even from faith itself, we have, unsurprisingly, also found ourselves battered by depression, anxiety and an unfruitful search for meaning.
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“DTF St. Louis” tells the roller-coaster story of Clark Forrest (the always excellent Jason Bateman), a local TV weatherman, and Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), Clark’s best friend and on-air American Sign Language interpreter. Both are caught in imperfect marriages. Floyd is hammered by financial problems.
At Clark’s suggestion, they turn to a St. Louis online hookup site for married people, the titular DTF. Chaos ensues. So does humor. Ultimately, so does death.
We learn Clark is having a kinky affair with Floyd’s wife (Linda Cardellini). When Floyd discovers his best friend and the wife he adores are cheating on him, he not only doesn’t condemn them, he encourages them, and, in a manner of speaking, joins in.
Through a series of misunderstandings, Floyd also falls into gay hookups, even though he’s strictly heterosexual. Mainly, he doesn’t want to hurt the first date’s feelings, and agrees to a liaison with a second guy because he’s desperate to find somebody — anybody — with whom he might experience a spiritual connection.
But the power of this HBO series is that what in other films or TV shows would simply be played as a sordid tale presented for voyeuristic yucks or titillation, here it’s offered as a serious meditation on the human need for meaning.
There are no villains in “DTF St. Louis.” Neither Clark nor Floyd is evil. Indeed, both care about, and want the best for, each other and their wives and kids. They’re just lost souls who are, in the long-ago words of a minister friend of mine, “looking for love in all the wrong places.” (That, of course, was a reference to Johnny Lee’s 1980 country music hit).
And in their desperate search for anything that may fill the gnawing pain in their hearts, these two fictional characters strike me as emblematic of a growing and well-documented portion of the American populace. Research suggests the despair experienced by Clark and Floyd is rampant, especially among younger adults.
To cite just a few examples:
In Psychology Today, Dr. Jordan Grumet talks about a study that found “up to 91 percent of people experience purpose anxiety, a frustrating, even depressing, struggle to define their life’s purpose.”
A study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education determined that three in five young adults feel life lacks meaning and purpose.
A Gallup survey this year said 45 percent of Gen Zers report lacking meaning, purpose or both.
This psychic rootlessness seems to be increasing — or at least is increasingly noticed by scholars — at the same time America is experiencing an historic falling away from religion.
A 2024 study by Pew Research, for instance, found that the religiously unaffiliated — atheists, agnostics and those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” — are now 28 percent of the U.S. adult population. As recently as 2007, they made up just 16 percent. “Nones” are now the largest religious cohort, larger than Catholics (23 percent) or evangelical Protestants (24 percent).
Is there a link between an increase in despair and anxiety and the waning influence of religious faith? It’s hard to say. The very first thing I learned in my first grad school statistics class was that correlation is not the same as causation.
It’s possible that people are falling into loneliness and despair because they’ve rejected God and faith. But it’s also possible they were previously involved in religion and found nothing there of value, which led to their spiritual malaise.
It may be there’s something altogether different at play. A leading academic researcher on happiness, Arthur Brooks, has suggested the invention of the smartphone is the real culprit in our culture’s despair.
What I’m about to suggest, then, is biased and anecdotal, not scientific.
But as Liz and I watched “DTF St. Louis,” I kept thinking that more than anything Clark and Floyd needed a life-changing dose of Jesus.
Sorry for sounding like a preacher here … but I am a preacher.
Plus, I’m a preacher for a reason. I once wasn’t a believer. In fact, I was a devout hedonist. I know about meaninglessness, despair, loneliness. I’ve lived them.
One of the great benefits of religion is that it offers us meaning and, consequently, hope. St. Paul said this: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Hope. Joy. Peace. Trust. They’re byproducts of faith.
Any church worth the name doesn’t teach us to deny reality. Believers suffer, too. Believers have bad marriages, get sick, experience betrayal. Eventually believers die.
But religion teaches us that even when we’re lonely, we’re never alone. Faith says that when we suffer, our suffering has meaning; if we let it, suffering can reveal powerful truths about the universe and about God.
“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure,” the author of Hebrews wrote.
That’s what I wanted to say to those lonely, sweet, messy guys in “DTF St. Louis”: “Look beyond yourselves. Call out to God. There’s an anchor for your soul.”
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a monthly column about faith and religion for Religion Unplugged.