What to stream this week: Jason Bateman’s twisted suburban noir, plus five more picks

This week’s picks include DTF St Louis, a bittersweet tale of male friendship with a murder in the middle starring Jason Bateman and David Harbour, plus a bloody action thriller with Priyanka Chopra, and the return of The Artful Dodger.

DTF St Louis ★★★★½ (HBO Max)

Don’t be misled by the suggestive title. HBO Max’s new limited series is a quietly thoughtful and bittersweet viewing experience. Galvanised by a suspicious death, this story of male best friends – where one of the men is secretly having an affair with the other’s wife – can play as a drily black comedy or a suburban noir. But even as it moves to these genre contours, the central performances and the writing keep unearthing new strands of humanity, whether flawed or bewildering.

Found dead in compromising circumstances, Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour) is a burly sign language interpreter who worked alongside his pal, local television weatherman Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman). The two St Louis cops from different departments partnered on the case, Jodie Plumb (Joy Sunday) and Donoghue Homer (Richard Jenkins), soon have a file filled with questions where the obvious answers keep being dispelled. The plot quickly makes clear that Clark was having an affair with Floyd’s wife, Carol Love-Smernitch (Linda Cardellini). The why is a different matter.

DTF St Louis, named for the hook-up app Clark introduces Floyd to in one of the many illuminating flashbacks, was written and directed by Steven Conrad. His previous shows, including Amazon Prime Video’s droll espionage tale Patriot, had lashings of absurdism and elevated circumstances. There’s still hints of that here – Floyd’s penis curvature is a recurring topic – but the show, set in 2018, is deliberately everyday. These are ordinary people, at first glance, whose circumstances and dreams and desires are revealed to be anything but.

The central relationships are patiently stitched together, so you can see the best intentions and the damaging turning points. Floyd projects as a jolly buffoon initially, but he’s so genuine and hopeful that the audience, like Clark, wants him to succeed, and there is an entire plot with Floyd and his disaffected stepson that goes from comical to heartwarming. Conrad keeps sneaking empathy into the deception, and subverting expectations. Every exchange between the mismatched Plumb and Homer is amusingly deadpan.

There is so much for the cast to work with. Disenchantment, self-loathing, renewal, and buried optimism bubble up through the long, and often tender, exchanges. The great Peter Sarsgaard turns up in a small recurring role, which reminds you how great Sarsgaard is. A visual gag will play off personal anguish, or vice versa, but either way the impact always resonates. Sad comedy or funny tragedy? Either way, few recent shows have inspired such a level of reflection in me. I’m going to be thinking about DTF St Louis for a long time.

The Bluff ★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

Priyanka Chopra Jonas continues her action hero audition with this bloody 19th-century Venn diagram of Die Hard, John Wick and various video games. With Queensland doubling for the Cayman Islands, The Bluff sets up the Citadel star as Ercell Bodeen, a hardy wife and mother whose very particular set of skills is revealed when a pirate crew led by the bloodthirsty Captain Connor (Karl Urban, correctly chewing scenery) come seeking missing gold and much vengeance.

While the Caymanian filmmaker Frank E. Flowers (Haven) is careful to depict the diverse detail of his West Indies homeland in 1846, the movie works because of the care put into the action scenes. With steampunk weapons and boobytraps adding to the mayhem, Ercell works her way through the invaders in hand-to-hand combat, jungle pursuits and labyrinth ambushes. The fight choreography is detailed and Chopra performs enough of it to be persuasive.

Veteran Australian actor David Field plays a man of God who knows a thing or two about muskets, and that’s typical of the vintage swashbuckling archetypes that Flowers ties together. Ercell is the devoted mother who tells her son to look away before she buries a knife in an attacker’s back, but there are not enough pirates in the entire Caribbean to slow her down. The Bluff has rough edges, but it’s never workmanlike. Chopra deserves her Charlize Theron badge.

Shrill ★★★★ (Netflix)

This terrific 2019 comedy series – which can be warm and funny, astute and stinging – definitely deserves the second chance of a Netflix signal boost. Aidy Bryant plays budding Portland journalist Annie Easton, who is fed up with the limitations, whether encouraging or cruel, others place on her ambitions and plus-size body. Change come from clear-eyed self-belief, which makes sense given the hindrance of a supporting cast that includes a first-generation podcast bro boyfriend (Luke Jones) and an entitled Gen X hipster editor boss (John Cameron Mitchell). Funny lines, sharp realities.

The Artful Doger ★★★ (Disney+)

The second season of this unofficial Charles Dickens Down Under sequel, which finds Oliver Twist’s child pickpocket Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) failing to stay on the straight and narrow as an adult surgeon in a fictional 1850s British colony, really leans into skin-of-the-teeth chaos and sudden reversals of fortune. Energy overwhelms observation, which is fine unless you’re a stickler for historic detail. Benedict Hardie is wonderfully repugnant as a new villain from the DCU (Dickens Cinematic Universe), while as Fagin, David Thewlis continues to expertly put his thumb on every scene’s scale.

The Lincoln Lawyer ★★★ (Netflix)

Netflix has struggled to generate a roster of reliable series from familiar genres – the 2025 hospital drama Pulse was dead on arrival – but it has a good legal thriller with this adaptation of Michael Conelly’s series of novels about maverick Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). With creator David E. Kelley (The Practice, Big Little Lies) on board, the show’s fourth season picks up from the third’s finale with satisfying twists and tense risk, plus a welcome sense of emotional self-discovery. And, yes, Australian actor Angus Sampson is tops as Mickey’s burly investigator, Cisco.

Murder in Glitterball City ★★★½ (HBO Max)

This two-part true-crime documentary from veteran American filmmakers and producers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (Inside Deep Throat, Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures) is a deep dive into a gruesome 2009 murder in Louisville where questions remain about who the culprit truly was. Everyone involved was part of the city’s queer community, which provides a diffident investigation from the local police and a rich tapestry of supporting characters. It’s a 21st-century update of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and throughout there is empathy for all, including the forgotten victim, Jamie Caroll.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.