The new HBO Max series DTF St. Louis is a puzzle box with seemingly endless twists and turns, but only a few moving parts: Clark (Jason Bateman), a TV weatherman in a stagnant marriage; Floyd, a somewhat awkward ASL interpreter with health issues and money problems; and Carol (Linda Cardellini), Floyd’s wife, whose relentless determination to get what she wants comes with a pair of sharp elbows. In a moment of foreshadowing, Clark and Floyd bond during coverage of a hurricane.

 When Clark suggests that he and Floyd check out a dating app for married people called DTF St. Louis, all three are swept up into a cascade of unexpected consequences, one of them ends up dead, and a mismatched pair of investigators — Joy Sunday’s insightful Jodie and Richard Jenkins’ staid Homer — pick at clues and narrative strands that gradually unwind a complicated sequence of events in which not everything is as is seems. After all, what can you expect from an app whose name stands for “Down to Fuck?”

The show blends its labyrinthine plotting with a pace that can be described as meditative; writer-director Steve Conrad, who concocted the story together with Harbour, lets us marinate in the characters’ conflicts and contradictions in scenes that unspool in an unhurried, almost serene manner… if, that is, same-sex hookups, marred Playgirl centerfolds, role-play scenarios centered around dominance, and elaborate mind games can be called serene.

In classic whodunit fashion, suspicion shifts from one player to the next, but it’s on the periphery that we glimpse the juiciest action: Floyd’s good-hearted attempts to reach his troubled stepson, Clark’s struggle to bring some measure of satisfaction to his life, Carol’s unstoppable commitment to forging a better life, and the understated push and pull between Jodie and Homer as she juggles the demands of the case along with Homer’s unimaginative investigative style (a jaded view of police work that verges on “can’t be bothered”).

Yes, there’s a corpse found under highly suspicious circumstances, and there’s a body of evidence that can be interpreted in various ways; whodunits are always a guessing game played between author and audience. But the real mystery lies at the intersection of the safe and boring and the wild possibilities offered by the pursuit of transgressive fantasies.

DTS St. Louis airs Sunday nights at 9pm on HBO. It streams on Max.

Watch the trailer below: