Note: This story contains spoilers from “DTF St. Louis” Episode 4.
From the very beginning, “DTF St. Louis” has been willing to take big swings. It proved that in its first episode when it revealed that Floyd Smernitch’s (David Harbour) dead body had been discovered in the local “Kevin Kline Community Pools.” The show proved it again when Floyd later hopped on a playground bench and rode it like a gymnast would a pommel horse.
None of the show’s absurdist swings have been quite as unexpected, though, as Floyd and his best friend Clark Forrest’s (Jason Bateman) rap duet in “DTF St. Louis” Episode 4. For a few, glorious minutes, the episode, titled “Missouri Mutual Life & Health Insurance Company,” turns into a late ’90s music video as Floyd and Clark become the self-dubbed “Thunder Boys” and deliver a rehearsed rap routine about Floyd’s life insurance diet plan.
It is ridiculous. It is awesome.
Speaking with TheWrap, Bateman called the sequence simply “a miracle” and marveled at “DTF St. Louis” creator Steven Conrad’s ability to fill the HBO series with things that should take you out of it and yet don’t.
“He has this confidence and boldness and keen sense of recipe that allows him to calibrate all these things,” Bateman said. “It’s like he innately knows that, because there’s going to be a rap scene where you’re looking to the camera like you’re in a Beastie Boys music video, he needs to counterbalance that with the most raw, grounded, emotional, heartbreaking honesty. They have to equal each other, you know? And then our job was just to play the middle.”
“It sounds deliberate now, but I don’t think any of us ever talked about that concoction on set at all,” the actor admitted. “I think innately we all just kind of knew and could sense that it would all fit together.”
Harbour, for his part, said that he did talk to Conrad about how the creator intended to use these screwball, heightened comedic moments to “build” the show. “Steven said, ‘You have the pommel horse scene so that you can have ‘Thunder Boys.’ You do, you know, need to set up a world where we’re going to play around with your idea of enjoyment in television,” Harbour told TheWrap.
As for his and Bateman’s unexpected duet, the “Stranger Things” alum said, “There was just something about the idea of these two guys on bikes rapping about their middle-aged diet plan.”
When it came to the actual filming of the standout musical sequence, it began with Harbour and Bateman recording their duet in a “weird little sound studio.” According to Harbour, one of the two actors took that process a lot more seriously than the other, too.
“I will throw him under the bus. Jason Bateman was very serious,” Harbour revealed with a laugh. “We’d just recorded it and we were playing around, and Jason wanted to go back and do it over again.” Sitting next to him, Bateman said with a shrug, “I just didn’t feel like I nailed it. It really felt like that ninth take was the one. It’s not my strong suit, so I really had to dig in.”
“He worked so hard on nailing the little things until it sounded the way it does now, which is, you know. I mean…,” Harbour recalled, trailing off.
“You’re welcome,” Bateman said, cutting in and sending his co-star into another fit of uproarious laughter.
“DTF St. Louis” airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
