Ok, Now I'm Convinced The Writers On DTF St. Louis Are Just Trolling My Hometown

If you’re going to put the name of a city in the title of your show, as DTF St. Louis has, you should at least pay lip service to getting stuff about that city correct. The show, which you can watch with an HBO Max subscription, does so much right that I’ve now become convinced the writers are deliberately getting everything wrong about St. Louis. Now that I think about it, maybe that plays into the plot.

The Wrong Grocery Store

As I’ve written before, it doesn’t take much for the writers to get some stuff correct about St. Louis. I don’t need (or really want) a bunch of random inside jokes or Easter Eggs, but at least get the geography correct! Some things would take simple 20-second Google searches to get right, yet so much of it is just flat wrong. The latest example was Carol (Linda Cardinelli) shopping at Albertson’s supermarket. Albertson’s is a huge chain, I get it… But it doesn’t have any stores in St. Louis. Not one. There are two very large regional chains in town, and national chains like Aldi and Whole Foods, but no Albertson’s. As I said, a quick internet search could confirm this.

Honestly, it’s not just one thing; it’s all the things adding up that they get wrong that now have me convinced that they are purposely doing it. Is this an inside joke? The writing is not lazy, so why does this part of the writing feel like it? Trolling. That’s the only answer. They are making me and my hometown brethren angry. That’s fair, we’re an excitable bunch when it comes to the STL. We get dunked on a lot, so when we see a show with our town’s name in it, we get excited. Trolling us is actually pretty funny. Or maybe it isn’t trolling, maybe it’s something else.

Is This The Point?

What if there is actually a method to the madness? As DTF St. Louis has progressed, we’ve learned that pretty much everyone on the show is an unreliable narrator. The two police officers have been sifting through endless BS from everyone they interview, mostly Carol and Clark (Jason Bateman). The stories they tell are all slightly different. The things they remember are different. Maybe the details about St. Louis are just a big meta example of not trusting what you see.

If this is the case, then I owe the show BIG kudos, and I will eat every complaint I’ve had about the representation of St. Louis. They have done some subtle things correctly, like getting the date of a Cardinals game correct, and being spot on about the weather for certain days (assuming the show is set in 2022, as has been theorized). As I said, the writing isn’t lazy. If this is another level of that, I’ll be very impressed.

If not, I’ll still watch, of course, as it’s one of the most fun shows on the 2026 TV schedule to talk about and theorize on, as I’ve done here. I might be wrong, but I have to know what is right.