“DTF St. Louis” and the New Story of the Suburbs

Summary

Podcast Summary: "DTF St. Louis” and the New Story of the Suburbs

Podcast: Critics at Large | The New Yorker
Episode Date: April 2, 2026
Hosts: Vinson Cunningham, Nomi Fry, Alexandra Schwartz
Main Theme: How HBO's "DTF St. Louis" and other recent media reshape and interrogate the meaning of the American suburbs in art and culture.

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the shifting narrative of the American suburbs as depicted in the new HBO miniseries "DTF St. Louis" and other recent cultural texts. The hosts discuss longstanding suburban tropes—placid exteriors masking inner turmoil, the American dream versus nightmare—and reflect on how modern portrayals both inherit and subvert these conventions amidst demographic change, evolving social mores, and persistent cultural anxieties.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. DTF St. Louis: The Surreal Suburban Whodunit

Timestamp: 02:09–16:27

• Premise: HBO's "DTF St. Louis" stars Jason Bateman as Clark Forrest, a St. Louis weatherman leading an outwardly average life. He befriends Floyd Smirnich (David Harbour), a sign language interpreter, and together they join a local extramarital sex app. After a neighborhood affair and Floyd's shocking death, the series morphs into an existential whodunit.
• Suburban Setting: The show uses the familiar outward calm of suburbia as a backdrop for suppressed dissatisfaction and secret lives.
• Performances: Jason Bateman and David Harbour receive praise for embodying the complexities of male suburban malaise and friendship. Linda Cardellini is highlighted for her nuanced role as Floyd’s wife Carol, whose practical struggles anchor the show’s realism.
• Tone:
  • Vincent: Finds the show’s "babyish, repetitive, almost Cro-Magnon language" (12:20) anthropological and surreal.
  • Nomi: Critiques its "fake eccentric" aesthetic, feeling “the heightened surrealism ... didn't connect to me to the actual story at hand.” (13:24)
  • Alex: Admits, “This show just scratched such a deep itch for me ... I love watching it.” (14:12)
• Suburban Anxiety: Scenes such as a dead family car dramatize the constant, precarious striving to maintain middle-class status, making the fear of losing it palpable (17:55).
• Gender Lens: The show, like classic suburban texts, puts men at the narrative center but, as Vincent points out, "all the themes and the dangers ... happen in the figure of the woman" (18:33), with Carol’s behind-the-scenes labor keeping her family afloat.

2. Tracing the Suburban Canon & Its Discontents

Timestamp: 21:36–32:00

• Suburban History (Levittown, post-WWII): Vincent notes early suburbs arose from government subsidy and military reward—an “almost reward for people who had fought in the Great War” (21:40).
• Classic Works:
  • John Cheever’s "The Swimmer" (24:00): Outward comfort masks roiling emotional and moral malaise.
  • Judy Blume’s Wifey (1977): Captures the “incursion of feminism” into the picture of the stifling suburban housewife.
• Suburban Representation by Era:
  • 1950s: Even at their origin, the "white picket fence" ideal had dystopian undertones (28:10).
  • 1980s: John Hughes movies and Back to the Future embody “re-enchantment with the prosperity and security and promise of the American Dream” (27:59), yearning for a 'simpler' past.
  • 2000s & onward: The dark undercurrent remains—“the drama ... is about whether [the protagonist] can allow herself to ... experience happiness or... continue to live with the social death” (All That Heaven Allows, 29:30).

3. Suburbia as Teen Arena and Site of Horror

Timestamp: 32:36–35:38

• Teen Movies:
  • John Hughes’ films, American Pie, Superbad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Suburbs as arena for adolescent rites, tension, and existential weirdness.
• Suburbs & Horror:
  • From Home Alone to Scream, the “safety” of the suburbs is repeatedly punctured by violence or threat, literalizing the lurking darkness beneath neatly trimmed lawns.

4. Suburban Strife: Neighborly Conflict & Legalism

Timestamp: 38:42–44:29

• Modern Portrayals: Dystopian, declinist narratives dominate.
• HBO’s Neighbors: Petty disputes (e.g., lawn boundaries) escalate, often with everyone armed—“the stakes could not be lower... yet they couldn’t be higher in ... volume of dispute and ... violence” (40:12).
• Ownership & Territory: Vincent analyzes, “Everything quintessentially American—property, the right to protect—are all ... operative in this space more than in any other” (41:01).
• Legalism: Suburban life is marked by “privacy, land, territory,” enforced by law and social rituals (42:08).

5. Evolving Social Dynamics in Today’s Suburbs

Timestamp: 45:31–48:16

• Race & Demographics: Alex cites a Brookings report—by 2020, people of color made up 45% of suburbia (46:24), a sharp change from the lily-white image of the past.
• Cultural Meaning: The suburban nightmare now includes “division, anger over small things ... obsession with personal property, and ... dehumanizing of the other” (46:45), with MAGA politics evoking a return to mythical 1950s suburbia.

6. A New Narrative: Sweetness, Friendship, and Yearning for Connection

Timestamp: 47:45–50:10

• Despite the darkness, shows like DTF St. Louis and Friendship (2025 film) discover “sweetness and generosity ... where you don’t expect it” (47:45), especially in depictions of unexpected male friendship born from isolation.
• Nomi notes, “I’m living in the suburbs and I have no community. I’m totally alone. And I want to have a friend. And especially because I’m a man and men don’t have friends.” (50:01)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Suburban Universality:
  Alex: “Even if you have not grown up there... you really have. The mall. Did I spend time at the mall? No, I couldn’t... but I feel like I did.” (05:38)
• Existential Edge:
  Vincent: "The description really can never do justice to the actual kind of fabric of the show, which is totally bizarre. The characters speak in this sort of babyish, repetitive, almost Cro-Magnon language...” (12:20)
• Gendered Suburban Labor:
  Vincent: “A surface protagonism of men, but ... all of the themes ... happen in the figure of the woman." (18:33)
• Dread of Downward Mobility:
  Nomi: “The terror of the suburbs, in a way. How will we get somewhere if we don’t have a car?” (18:06)
• Classic Suburban Critique:
  Nomi (on Cheever): “The placid dream of the suburbs is... maintained through lots of alcohol ... to prop up a kind of facade over the roiling dissatisfactions...” (24:10)
• 80s Nostalgia Theory:
  Nomi: "My theory about Back to the Future... Let's erase the 60s and 70s ... and go back to the suburb of the 50s, before things got fucked up.” (26:34)
• *Suburban Horror:
  Alex: “You think that your nice house is gonna keep out a psychopath? Think again. Or a totally different kind of horror, Home Alone. Oh, my god.” (35:28)
• Declinist Present:
  Nomi: “It's looking bad... there's a kind of declinist narrative... none of the perceived upsides.” (38:42)
• Suburban Legalism:
  Vincent: “Stand your ground is a very suburban concept... If you come here and I see you on my ring camera ... I can shoot you.” (41:01)
• Changing Demographics:
  Alex: “In 1990, roughly 2 out of 10 suburbanites were people of color...[by] 2020, 45%...” (46:24)
• Yearning for Connection:
  Nomi: “I’m living in the suburbs and I have no community. I’m totally alone. And I want to have a friend. And especially because I’m a man and men don’t have friends.” (50:01)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:09 – Introduction of DTF St. Louis as suburban existential whodunit
• 07:04 – Why Bateman as “average American male” is key
• 14:54 – Breakdown of the show’s tone and ensemble cast
• 17:55 – Suburban anxiety embodied in material (the car scene)
• 21:36 – Historical roots: Levittown and suburbia’s invented identity
• 24:10 – Cheever, Blume, and the earliest cracks in suburban myth
• 27:59 – The 80s, nostalgia, and mythic restoration in pop culture
• 32:36 – Teen movies, horror, and the suburbs’ double life
• 38:42 – Modern suburban decline and the “Neighbors” docuseries
• 41:01 – Territory, privacy, and law in contemporary suburbia
• 46:24 – Diversity and demographic change in suburbia
• 47:45 – New stories: sweetness, isolation, and the search for friendship
• 50:01 – The crisis of male loneliness in the suburbs

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Conclusion

This episode threads together the history, myths, and evolving realities of suburbia through pop culture’s lens, ultimately asking: What do the suburbs mean in 2026? Are the cracks only widening—or could new solidarities transform the "quiet desperation" of suburbia into something more generative? Through media old and new, from Cheever to DTF St. Louis, the hosts contend with the suburbs not just as a place, but as a mutable story America tells itself—equal parts fantasy, anxiety, and fragile hope.

Transcript

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[Alex Schwartz]

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[Nomi Frye]

This is critics Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Nomi Frye.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Alex Schwartz]

And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, hello. Hey, what's up, critics? How are you doing?

[Nomi Frye]

Spring is springing.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's warm. It's not.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, it's feeling good.

[Nomi Frye]

Lots of cats on the way to the subway today, standing at the door of the bodega, greeting, greeting customers as they come in and so on.

[Alex Schwartz]

A wonderful sign for us all. Yes. Well, today, my friends, forget about the bodega. We are leaving the big city behind and we are heading to the suburbs. This is our topic for the day because it's the setting of a new show that we are going to talk about called DTF St. Louis on HBO. The show stars Jason Bateman as Clark Forrest, a weatherman living outside of St. Louis, who has a totally nice, average seeming, prosperous, nothing to write home about life. And he befriends a sign language interpreter. They hit it off, they strike up a friendship, and they both sign up for a sex site called DTF St. Louis. At the end of the first episode, Floyd is dead in A Presumed Murder. He was my friend and he's dead. We know you were there, Clark. What's going on in there? Floyd began using the site to see men, and then the show becomes a whodunit. But I would argue, and we'll get here, that it is more of an existential whodunit even than the practical kind. So the show is a suburbs text. It's all about life that looks good from the outside, but inside is cracked and peeling and does not have that perfect veneer that maybe others would assume it does. And it occurred to me, and I think to all of us, that the suburbs is rich terrain. What are some of your favorite works about the suburbs, if I may ask you to just kick it off, guys.

[Nomi Frye]

Oh, God, there's Mad Men, of course, one of Mad Men's precursors, the works of John Cheever, mostly as short stories, some of which appeared in this very magazine, New Yorker.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Speaking of this very magazine, also the stories of and novels of John Updike.

[Alex Schwartz]

Absolutely.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Similarly, suburbs focused.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, absolutely. The films of Douglas Sirk, often about trying to defy the conformity that is being pressed down by the society, as exemplified by the suburban setting of some of his most amazing films, such as all that Heaven Allows, Desperate Housewives. Guys, remember that?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Desperate Housewives, of course.

[Alex Schwartz]

I think it's actually kind of great. So today we're going to be talking about the suburbs as a backdrop for American life and American art. DTF St. Louis is one of a handful of more recent texts to depict the suburbs for modern audiences. There's also last year's film Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, and the new docu series Neighbors. And one thing that does occur to me is that the suburbs have long been used, I think, as a kind of metonym for. For the society where everything seems hopeful. Families are intact. The dads are going off to work with their briefcases. The moms are staying behind to do whatever they do from nine to five. And yet right now, the composition of the suburbs is changing. They've become more diverse. They are not anymore the kind of white picket fence vision that we think of. So I am wondering, what do the suburbs mean to us now? So that's today on Critics at Large, the Cracked veneer of the suburbs. So let's just lay our cards on the table, as we love to do. We are recording this episode from one World Trade center in New York City. The three of us live in New York City.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

We are not suburban people. But one thing that does strike me about the suburbs is even if you have not grown up there, if you have been a consumer of American media in any form, you really have.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Mm.

[Alex Schwartz]

The mall. Did I spend time at the mall? No, I couldn't spend time at the mall. I mean, sometimes I would visit my camp friends and then I would.

[Nomi Frye]

Whoa. What was it like for you when you visited the mall?

[Alex Schwartz]

The sensory explosion. The scent.

[Nomi Frye]

The scent.

[Alex Schwartz]

Suddenly you're in a closed emporium with scent pouring at you. Perfume. Cinnabon. Music.

[Nomi Frye]

Auntie Anne's.

[Alex Schwartz]

Auntie Anne's. Absolutely.

[Nomi Frye]

I mean, speaking of them all, you know, my very own daughter, a 14 year old who was never, you know, has grown up in Brooklyn her whole life, takes the bus with a friend down to, like, deep Brooklyn to go to the one mall she can get to because she wants to kind of, like, browse Hot Topic and Spencer's Gifts. Like God intended.

[Alex Schwartz]

As if. Right? As an American. That's right.

[Nomi Frye]

God damn it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Love it or leave it.

[Alex Schwartz]

So with that in mind, let's turn to DTF St. Louis. There you go. This is a miniseries airing on hbo. As of right now, five episodes are out and there are two left to air. It was written and directed by Steven Conrad, and we were initially clued into this show because, Vincent, you wrote a piece about it. And why did you choose this as a subject?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I chose it because it stars one of my favorite TV actors of all time, Jason Bateman, who is always, it seems to me, acting as a sort of surrogate for the audience and in so doing kind of gestures at this creature, the average American male, who almost by definition, at least in his representations, I'm not really talking about real demography, but in his representations, is a white guy who lives in the suburbs, has some level of prosperity, but also some level of ennui and dissatisfaction. And he plays that, I think Bateman does to A T in DTF St. Louis. It was, for me, another classic Bateman performance. It is. The first season is still unfolding, and I thought that it was a really great way to talk about Bateman, but to also talk about this idea of pure, prosperous averageness and it's discontents, which is, you know, a suburban idea.

[Alex Schwartz]

I want to get into the show. I want to talk to you guys about it. Let's just set it up first. Give me the basics. What's going on in this show? Who are the main players?

[Nomi Frye]

Okay, so we have as the, you know, lead of the show, one of the two main leads. We have Jason Bateman, as Vincent said, he plays Clark Forrest. He is a weatherman in a suburb of St. Louis called Twyla. The average, you know, middle class American. He has a wife, he has two kids. It's all fine. Nice house. He has like, he's a little quirky. Has like a recumbent bike that he takes out on little rides. And everything seems to be going swimmingly until he meets Floyd Smirnich, played by David Harbour, who is an American Sign Language interpreter. And they meet when they do a broadcast together. You know, they begin working together and then off work as well, they begin to hang out and they become friends. The kind of. The plot begins to thicken when they all have this sort of like social neighborhood gathering where they play cornhole.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's a cornhole party.

[Nomi Frye]

It's a cornhole party, which I've never heard of before. I don't know if this is like a real thing or not, but anyway,

[Vincent Cunningham]

there is parties where cornhole is present, but certainly not a cornhole party.

[Nomi Frye]

It's a call. They keep calling referring to it as a cornhole party.

[Alex Schwartz]

I'd like to see you investigate whether or not this is it.

[Nomi Frye]

This is my life's work now.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, I was gonna sign that one for you.

[Nomi Frye]

So Clark meets Floyd's wife Carol, played by the lovely Linda Cardellini, and they begin an affair. Meanwhile, Clark convinces Floyd to join this hookup app called DTF St. Louis, which is a kind of like an Ashley Madison type app where like married people are looking for a little bit of fun outside the marriage, et cetera.

[Alex Schwartz]

So you meet these people, married people. It's mostly for married people, the reporter was saying, who are very happy and they want to stay in their healthy marriages. But

[Jason Adam Katzenstein]

they're also down to like fuck

[Alex Schwartz]

people that they've never met before in St. Louis. So you can spice it without creating commitments or.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Spice what?

[Alex Schwartz]

Spice your life. Spice it up.

[Nomi Frye]

Okay, the first episode after all of this is set up, the first episode of the series ends with Floyd's body being discovered. He is dead. Dead as a doornail. And then the show kind of becomes like a whodunnit. Like, who killed him? The main suspect is Clark. You know, Clark is quickly discovered was having an affair with Carol. And so this is kind of the setup. Was that okay?

[Alex Schwartz]

I thought that was beautiful. Lovely. Concise, yet informative.

[Vincent Cunningham]

You did it all.

[Alex Schwartz]

It was great.

[Nomi Frye]

Wow.

[Alex Schwartz]

And now we're equipped to ask the question, what'd you guys think?

[Vincent Cunningham]

I love it. The description really can never do justice to the actual kind of fabric of the show, which is totally bizarre. The characters speak in this sort of babyish, repetitive, almost CRO Magnon language. They say weird stuff like, yeah, I fucking love it. In stuff one person says to another when they're describing the joys of their affair. A lot of odd repetitions like, DTF, St. Louis down to fuck DTF. Or we are from the St. Louis area. They say these really strange. That almost make this a kind of, like, anthropology. It's got this really alien texture that make the kind of, I don't know, loose strands of desire and boredom and will, I guess, all seem all the more basic, I guess, sort of forced into being by childish urges, et cetera. So I think it's kind of. It's got the surrealistic edge that I really enjoy and can't really even put my finger on. I really enjoy it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Nomi, what do you think?

[Nomi Frye]

Okay. This show drove me crazy. It drove me bananas. I totally understand. It is an odd tone. It is a surrealist kind of like, environment and cadence and. But it felt unearned to me. I was like, I understand that it's supposed to be the sort of like, damn good coffee, you know, sort of like Lynchian. Let us put a kind of like blandly smiling face on the unspoken desires and angers and, you know, all of the things that trouble us in our kind of boring day to day life. But I just didn't buy it. I didn't buy it. I was like, why are these people? What is the connection between any of these people? Why are they doing anything that they do? The kind of like the heightened surrealism of it didn't connect to me to the actual story at hand. It was like, fake eccentric to me. You know, I sort of didn't buy the gambit, the gambit of it. But I will say that I do think, for our purposes, that it is a good suburbs text.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

I do think there's a lot to say in this. The gap between, like, everything's fine, you know, we're doing great here. Hi, dee ho neighbor. You know, like, diddly do neighborino, you know, whatever. And the kind of actual truth of the dissatisfaction and the troubles that simmer within.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. How about you, Alex?

[Alex Schwartz]

Love it. This show just scratched such a deep Itch for me. An itch I didn't even know I had. I love it. I love watching it. Yeah, I want to continue watching it. I've seen four out of five episodes and I can't wait to get home and watch the fifth. Oh, my God, what's happened to me? What's going on?

[Nomi Frye]

That's just great.

[Alex Schwartz]

Well, part of it does have to do with this tone that Vincent was describing, this comic, ironic tone where of course, the setting is in a very ordinary suburban place. And there is something obvious about the ironies of the tone. There's a lot of. It also comes out once the investigation is underway. There are two detectives involved. One is played by Richard Jenkins, who's just a fantastic actor.

[Nomi Frye]

I do like him.

[Alex Schwartz]

And then his much younger, I would say competitor. But they start working together at some point. Joy Sunday, the actress Joy Sunday plays Jodie Plum, who's a special crimes officer from the Twyla, Missouri Police Department. And they start getting into it with these characters. The thing I liked most about the show are the performances. I think there are three amazing performances anchoring the show. Jason Bateman, who Vincent talked about, the surprise of a lifetime for me is loving David Harbour's performance.

[Vincent Cunningham]

He's brilliant.

[Alex Schwartz]

Was ready to hate that man because of Lily Allen. I was ready to be opposed. And then he plays totally against life type. I think since he was the villain in the Lily Allen breakup album, Breakup Period. He plays this soft hearted, deeply lovable man. And that's where the show got me. Cause it's a show about problems with marriage, all the usual suburban complaints. But it also is a show about male friendship, a kind of inexplicable love between these two totally unfulfilled guys who actually have no other love interest in their lives. Guys, I was touched. I was moved.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's a very moving. He's got a soulfulness and also a strange. And the show actually exploits this. He's a very big man, but very kind of graceful of body. He's got kind of. It's like Chris Farley, how he had those ballerinas feet and he could really kind of dance. Harbour is very similar. He's got this grace that I don't know. He's a wonderful performer.

[Alex Schwartz]

So this show takes place in the St. Louis suburbs, a fact that is brought up repeatedly. And I want to ask what makes this a suburban text? Let's get into it.

[Nomi Frye]

One thing I did like is showing how being of the suburb sometimes can mean hanging on by your tippy toes to a certain Level to a certain class. You know, if one side is, like, there is this promised security, prosperity. The other side of it is a kind of, like, keeping up with the Joneses thing. And there's a scene where Floyd's car is dead. It's like 14. It's too old. It doesn't start. He leaves it. They still have Carol's car, but then they have to. Both of them have to go get to work. Both of them have to share the car. He tries to start it, and the car doesn't start. It catches. And this I did, like, because this seemed to me kind of real and, like, my heart kind of, like, stopped a little bit. And he's like, oh, shit. Oh, shit. And you can see her being like, oh, not this now. You know, this fucking loser I'm saddled with. How will we get to work? What will we do? We only have. And, you know, that sort of terror, which is kind of telegraphed in a very kind of small, minute way that is kind of like, for me, the terror of the suburbs, in a way. How will we get somewhere if we don't have a car?

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's it for most.

[Nomi Frye]

That's it. We're done. And I think the show does a good job of that. And I think that's a very suburban thing.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. And I think it does that also to reinforce this sort of classic suburban texture is it does a lot of that work through the figure of Carol, Floyd Smirnish's wife, who I think is played amazingly by Linda Cardellini.

[Alex Schwartz]

Totally agree.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Something that happens in a lot of suburban texts that I can think of, at least especially the ones that concern themselves with the domestic life, is a surface protagonism of men. But then actually, all of the themes and the dangers and this kind of peering over the edge of a kind of social death happens in the figure of the woman. You know, at first, it's these two guys who are friends, et cetera, et cetera, and Carol kind of just emerges slowly. First, she's an object of sexual desire. Clark, you know, you can see from the beginning at the cornhole party. Oh, he kind of likes her. And of course, in the fullness of time, it is revealed that they are having an affair. But then all of this stuff, trying to keep the family together. We come to see her using the affair with Clark as a way to reinforce her own family economically. But we see the sort of keeping things together, the backstage work of suburbia lands on her. Yeah, I think that is done brilliantly. And there's One moment that I really love, where they're on a swing set talking about DTF St. Louis. The two men are in this very childlike scene. And Clark, we see him go up and down, up and down. And at the zenith of the sort of the top of the tippy top of the swing's motion, you can see he's kind of like creep looking at this young girl across the fence doing

[Nomi Frye]

like yoga or something.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Exactly. Some very classic young woman thing. And this is his little glimpse. And it's just a similar thing where all of the desire and aggression and weirdness, lecherousness of the men and lands on just the body of a woman. I'm like, yeah, that's what this show's about.

[Alex Schwartz]

In a minute, how the suburbs went from American dream to American nightmare. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back. Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex and Money, the show from Slate, about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. Many of us have something going on behind closed doors. Like a listener we called Elizabeth, who told us she's a hoarder. I see mess beyond probably what most

[Nomi Frye]

people think of when they think of mess.

[Alex Schwartz]

We'll work through it all together on Death, Sex and Money. Listen wherever you get podcasts. Before we start talking about the suburbs canon and building up our suburbs canon, I just want to talk about the history of the suburbs a little bit because I was looking into it recently, even before we were doing this show, and it's fascinating to me. I think the the first true suburb is often considered to be Levittown. Do you guys know about Levittown on Long island where all the houses were built?

[Vincent Cunningham]

Abraham Levitt and his sons.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, Vincent, Speak to it. Tell us about it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Well, as is often the story when we think of cultural items that are meant to symbolize the American way of life and especially the free market, actually it was a great plan of subsidy building these Levitt towns, the iconic one being very close to here in Long island in the wake of World War II. It was a place for the military, the GIs, to come back and start a life. It was a heavily subsidized zone of almost reward for people who had fought in the Great War. So a space that needed to be filled for a specific purpose.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yes, absolutely. I mean, there were versions of suburbs before, but Levittown was the first planned community, gave the image for the post war suburb. It provides us with the kind of white picket fence, each identical house occupied by an identical family that forms our image of the suburbs and the backdrop to a lot of what we're gonna be talking about. And they exist in response to the chaos of war. Yeah, you're out there fighting, you're in this men's world and then you're expected to come home and assume this domestic placid experience. And I think the crackage is just built into that premise.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's right.

[Alex Schwartz]

It can't stand. So having said that, what are some depictions of the suburbs from early on that come to mind when we think about classic suburban works?

[Nomi Frye]

I feel like I'm like, has there ever been an art, a representation of the suburbs that wasn't problematized in some sense? Right? Because I'm like, okay, Cheever is pretty early, you know, like early 60s, you know, like a story like the Swimmer, for instance, like published in this very magazine in New Yorker in 1964, later made in 1968 into a movie starring Burt Lancaster. And I'm like, okay, this is like posts. I mean, it's heading there, but it's post like the sort of late 60s revolutionary foment and you know, the sort of deeper involvement in Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera, and certainly women's lib and all of that. And yet the whole story is about how actually the kind of the placid dream of the suburbs is in fact something that is not graspable in actual life, that is, is kind of maintained through lots of alcohol and sort of like bland niceties and maybe some clandestine affairs that end badly to prop up a kind of facade over the roiling dissatisfactions that lie in the heart of man. In the case of the Swimmer, but also surely women, which we get to maybe a little bit later, I'm thinking about like, you know, as I mentioned in last week's episode, I'm reading the new Judy Blume biography by Mark Oppenheimer, was reminded of her very racy book wifey from 1977, which is all about a kind of like nice upper middle class housewife in the New Jersey suburbs who is sick of the kind of imprisonment of being like a nice girl. Sandy Pressman, who is married to Norman, who has a thriving dry cleaning business. And she's like, fuck this, you know, I want to have fun. I want to like have sex with like various people. I want to have affairs. I want to be bad, you know, because I'm feeling like I'm sick of being at home. I'm sick of taking care of my like annoying kids, you know, and so the incursion of feminism into the whole picture of the suburbs also builds a critique of it.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's so funny that that question is such a good one, Naomi, because it seems like the portrayal of the suburb becomes problematized or not almost in parallel motion to the larger spirit of the age. If you think about when was the. What is the most positive portrayal of the suburbs? And you would have to say it happens in the 80s, right?

[Nomi Frye]

In the 80s.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And I want to say the John Hughes movie. The John Hughes movie comes into being at the same time as, like, Wall street and these other things. The whole political economy absolutely moves in parallel motion.

[Nomi Frye]

I have thoughts about that, for sure. I mean, I think the desire to return to a past that never was in the Reagan 80s, it's like. It's my theory about, like, Robert Zemeckis Back to the Future is basically that. Like, my theory. I don't know. I'm sure it's been said.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I want to hear your theory, people.

[Nomi Frye]

But, like, it's 1985, going back via the sort of time machine of DeLorean to 1955. And the idea is, let's erase the 60s and 70s, the decades where it all went wrong, and go back to the suburb of the 50s, before things got fucked up and our family became like a downwardly mobile, like, Loserville kind of example of kind of, you know, all these people who had dreams that didn't come to fruition. Let's go back. Let's teach dad to be a man. Let's teach him to, like, punch Biff in the face, the bully who's been cucking him forever. The mom will also, you know, gain respect for her, you know, by inhabiting her role perfectly. By inhabiting her role perfectly and not be a kind of, like, slutty drunkard. And he goes back to the 80s, and they have. Their house is really nice. They have a BMW. They have, like. The brother is working on Wall Street. The sister has dates.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. What are you wearing, Dave?

[Nomi Frye]

Marty, I always wear a suit to the office. Now, Biff, I want to make sure that we get two coats of wax

[Jason Adam Katzenstein]

this time, not just one.

[Alex Schwartz]

Just finishing up the second coat now. Now, Biff, don't con me. I'm sorry, Mr. McFly.

[Nomi Frye]

It's all good. You know, the suburb has been restored.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Like a re.

[Nomi Frye]

Enchantment process. A re. Enchantment with the prosperity and security and promise of the American dream.

[Alex Schwartz]

Couldn't love that theory more.

[Nomi Frye]

You will read about it in my forthcoming book, which is yet to be written.

[Alex Schwartz]

It was sounding Very cohesive. It definitely seemed like thought had been given to it prior to this episode. I'm all for it. So this actually brings up something that's been on my mind. I think this retro idea that starts in the 80s and absolutely has cropped up again with MAGA is the idea that 1950s was the fulfillment of America as America. That is what America should be. It should be a husband and a wife and 2.5 children in every home. And the husband is going to work on the commuter train and coming back. And the wife is holding down the, you know, the house. And all of this stuff, the stuff that's getting made about the suburbs in the 50s is dark. Yes, it's dystopian to begin with. And it's not like we wait until Mad Men to find out that that was a totally cracked situation. Actually, you can just watch the extraordinary melodrama all that Heaven Allows by Douglas Sirk. This is from 1955. I rewatched it recently. Blown away.

[Nomi Frye]

Wow.

[Alex Schwartz]

I didn't care.

[Nomi Frye]

You watch.

[Alex Schwartz]

We have Carrie Scott, played by a resplendent Jane Wyman, who, since we're talking about Reagan, was married to Ronald Reagan. Oh, yes, she's a widow, I should say. She's a widow with two adult children who are in college. And she falls in love with her gardener, who is a total do it yourselfer in a different American tradition.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Their lives were worlds apart. Carrie's world was bound by the country

[Alex Schwartz]

club set, their smug pretensions and their spiteful gossip. He is self sufficient and he doesn't need to keep up with the Joneses.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Ron's world was boundless. The great outdoors, the things that grow, and real people who give and take all that heaven allows of love.

[Alex Schwartz]

The drama of the movie is about whether Carrie Scott can allow herself to try to experience happiness or whether she must continue to live with the social death that is her lot in life as a widow of a successful businessman. And she has to live out that experience forever. But the thing I want to bring up, which I think is really fascinating, is this scene. Can I just show you guys this scene for a sec, please? She's sitting by herself, she has a glass of a cocktail and she just happens to notice Walden next to her. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed. If a man does not keep pace with his companions? Perhaps it's because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Why, that's beautiful. So she has an absolute revelation because she happened to come across this key clutch passage in Walden.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Swelling strings, we should say.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, I mean, swelling. This is a melodrama.

[Nomi Frye]

She's ready to toss away her pearls.

[Alex Schwartz]

It's just. It's absolutely spectacular. And it is presenting a different vision of America. Another slightly difficult, problematic one of total self reliance. You know, as we all know, Kay Thoreau kind of faked that. You have these two American dreams clashing in the space of the suburbs. Last thing I'll say on this is, Fast forward to 2004, what should be premiering but Desperate Housewives, another absolute classic. I'm watching the pilot, guys, the other day, as you do, because I'm thinking, let me remember what this thing was all about. I was kind of young, stunning comeback Teri Hatcher. And just. And just. Guys, take a look. Take a look at what Teri Hatcher says that her husband said to her. What did Carl say when you confronted him? You'll love this. He said, it doesn't mean anything. It was just sex. Page one of the Philanderer's Handbook. Yeah. And then he got this Zen look on his face and he said, you

[Vincent Cunningham]

know, Susan, most men live lives of quiet desperation.

[Alex Schwartz]

Please tell me you punched him. No, I said, really? And what do most women lead lives of noisy fulfillment. Good for you. Good for you, Susan. We got Thoreau in the burbs, but it's.

[Nomi Frye]

What a cast.

[Alex Schwartz]

What a cast.

[Nomi Frye]

Nicolette Sheridan, Eva Longoria.

[Alex Schwartz]

But I want to go back to this idea, Naomi, that you brought up of the suburbs and the suburbs and art as a kind of retro fantasy coming back in the 80s. It occurs to me, like, I feel like in the 90s. That continues through the 90s and the early 2000s, especially where teens are concerned.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Alex Schwartz]

Like the classic vision of American life, of what it is to be an American teenager, is the suburbs. It is American pie from 1999. It is.

[Nomi Frye]

Wow. American Pie.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, American Pie. Hugely influential to a generation.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah. Huge sort of like silly teen comedy the likes of which really doesn't get made so much anymore.

[Nomi Frye]

Chris Klein, Cara Reid.

[Alex Schwartz]

I mean, it's Natasha Lyonne. It's there. It's out there. Let me tell you, it's still out there. Superbad.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Superbad. Big one.

[Alex Schwartz]

Huge one.

[Nomi Frye]

Of course.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Here's another one, though, I think sort of a little earlier than the ones that you're mentioning. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is, like, all about someone who wants to live a normal suburban life and can't because she's the One who can recognize the monstrosity of the scene in the way others can't. You know, it's almost a literalization of, you know, there's something dark that others can't see. But it takes a special kind of protagonist to kind of X ray it.

[Nomi Frye]

They just won't let her. I was thinking about teen movies and of course, I was thinking about John Hughes and Sixteen Candles and, you know, Pretty in Pink and the Breakfast Club.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

And Ferris Bueller, of course, in another movie. This is not a John Hughes movie, but it's another teen movie from the 80s that I loved. Adventures in Babysitting. I don't know if you guys.

[Alex Schwartz]

I don't know that one.

[Nomi Frye]

Starring Elizabeth Chu.

[Vincent Cunningham]

I know of it. I haven't seen it.

[Nomi Frye]

Like, Elizabeth Chu is a babysits for her neighbors, prosperity, enjoyment. But they have to go into the city because her friend is, like, stranded in the bus station, the scary bus station with the homeless people and the crazy people and the black people. And all the things that happen in the city are what create the meat of the movie. But at the end of the movie with the parents none the wiser, they return, you know, Elizabeth Chu and the kids return just in time to the beautiful suburb and everything's okay. And it's as if nothing has ever happened. Thank God.

[Alex Schwartz]

And is it a happy ending?

[Nomi Frye]

It's a happy ending.

[Alex Schwartz]

Or is it a horror ending?

[Nomi Frye]

No, no, no, no, no. It's a really satisfying, sweet, like, funny

[Alex Schwartz]

teen movie that's so interesting. I mean, I do feel like suburban. The suburban setting has these kind of two functions very often in some of the stuff we're talking about, especially the more recent stuff for kids. It's kind of the teen movie setting. The par excellence, the big high school, the house party, the running around. And then the second is the suburbs, used when it's an adult focus, used as a scene for horror, for murderer, for horror. Basically, there's the lynch kind of horror of something that lurks beneath the surface. There's also horror, horror, Nightmare on Elm street horror. You think that your nice house is gonna keep out a psychopath? Think again. Or a totally different kind of horror, Home Alone. Oh, my God.

[Nomi Frye]

Scream.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, my God.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Scream.

[Nomi Frye]

Scream 7 just came out.

[Alex Schwartz]

We salute you. I will never see you Scream seven. But I'm glad to know you're out there.

[Nomi Frye]

I'm glad you exist.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah, well, this is. Can I take it back to Cheever for one second? So we got another kind of horror. Well, it is horror. That's the thing. It is horror. Nomi, you were talking about the swimmer. I want to talk about the story the 548, which the New Yorker published in 1954. Again, right in the heart of all of this. And this story is about an executive in New York City who's had a one night stand with his secretary. The next day he arranged for her to be fired. It's sad, it's upsetting. We read about what he did to her and then there's a kind of like jump scare, which is to me one of the more devastating things I've ever encountered. He's sitting on the commuter train and we learn that one of the women in front of him is his wife's confidant. And a few weeks ago he came home and he found that his wife had not made dinner. She was clearly drunk. And then we get this line. He had gone into the kitchen, followed by Louise, that's his wife. And he had pointed out to her that the date was the fifth. He had drawn a circle around the date on the kitchen calendar. One week is the 12th, he had said. Two weeks will be the 19th. He drew a circle around the 19th. I'm not gonna speak to you for two weeks, he had said. That will be the 19th. That line, that idea, the cold officiousness of it is horrifying and is so suburban as motif. And of course the suburbs were thrown a lot at the suburbs, but I think they're strong enough to take it. So much about the suburbs in the 50s and thereafter is about making sure that women stay at home and that men get to commute out and go into the world and return back and the tendant miseries of that. So I feel like that's still a legacy that is being worked through.

[Nomi Frye]

Absolutely.

[Alex Schwartz]

In a minute. What the suburbs mean to us today. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back. La Brega is back. This season we're spending time with the

[Nomi Frye]

people and symbols that represent Puerto Rico.

[Alex Schwartz]

We're proud boricuas. And what does that mean?

[Nomi Frye]

And we are still in the fight. We're telling stories about champions from a place worth fighting for.

[Alex Schwartz]

Stories that will inspire.

[Nomi Frye]

Inspire you no matter where you're from.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Wow.

[Alex Schwartz]

This is La Brega campeones. Listen early and add free with Fuputo plus. So we threw it back to the 50s, we journeyed to the 80s. We took it to the 90s and the early 2000s. And now we're in 2026. And for this episode we've spent some time with some more Recent depictions of the suburbs. And I want to ask you guys, what is the picture of suburbia that we're getting today?

[Nomi Frye]

It's looking bad.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Alex Schwartz]

Oh, no.

[Nomi Frye]

I think what I find when I think about, like the depiction of the suburbs today is that kind of like there's a kind of declinist narrative. So there's all of the problems that have happened before, but now also there are none of like the perceived upsides. If we think about like a show like HBO's Neighbors, which was six episode docuseries that just finished airing, it's about neighborly disputes and neighborly disputes in mostly suburban. A lot of these fights are often so petty. For instance, there are two women living in West Palm Beach.

[Alex Schwartz]

So she's been my neighbor for almost 16 years. I mean, I've gone as far as picking her kids up from school for her. Her son actually used to babysit for me with my dog. We've been friends since I moved in up until a month and a half ago. You're not going to cut the grass. My attorney said you're not to cut the grass. I'm to cut the grass. It's my property. I will cut it because I'm not

[Nomi Frye]

getting fined by Cut it.

[Alex Schwartz]

Every single. You cut it on top of him cutting it. It was weeds. Giving 35ft away on somebody's whim is just not an option.

[Nomi Frye]

What they're fighting over is a tiny, like a very narrow strip of grass. Strip of lawn. It couldn't. The stakes could not be lower in kind of the material sense, and yet they couldn't be higher in the kind of like, level volume of dispute and the level of violence that it seems to be reaching. Both of them have guns, as many or almost all of the protagonists in the show do. They're like, we're gonna kill each other. We're gonna kill each other. Yeah, it's like, it's very, very depressing.

[Vincent Cunningham]

But this is the thing, though. They are small stakes. But of course, everything that is quintessentially American property.

[Nomi Frye]

Yes.

[Vincent Cunningham]

The right to violence, the right to protect, the right to protect land and its many meanings are all sort of intensely operative in this space more than in any other arrangement that you can imagine. If you're really in the country, there's a lot of uncontested woods that serve as a buffer between person and person in the city. We don't expect any of this stuff. I just hear your whole life through the walls, suburbs. It's like there is this privacy and security and there Is very little sort of outside. The kids today call them third spaces or whatever. So privacy, land, territory. It's all always happening down to this shrub is mine. The shrub, this branch is mine. The roots are yours. But as it comes over my lawn. The law is such a big thing in the suburbs. Stand your ground is a very suburban concept. That's like, okay, no, no, no. If you come here and I see you on my ring camera, by the way, again, another hallmark of the suburbs, I can shoot you.

[Alex Schwartz]

Vincent, how about you? Have you seen some more recent depictions of the suburbs that add to this thesis?

[Vincent Cunningham]

One that I have recently gotten into a show that actually came out last year, Is All Her Fault.

[Alex Schwartz]

Okay, tell us more.

[Vincent Cunningham]

It's a mystery thriller starring, to me, the radiant. I mean, she's just amazing. I love her in everything she does. Sarah Snook. She plays a woman named Marissa Irvine, who. She's a very successful finance person and so is her husband. And she goes to pick up her child from what she thinks was a playdate. As it happens, the person who lives there is not the person, the friend whose house that she thinks she's picking the child up from. It turns out that she's been sent a fic text message from someone who has absconded with the child.

[Alex Schwartz]

No. No.

[Vincent Cunningham]

And so the first. First of all, the first couple of minutes of this thing are unbearable to watch if you've ever been even around a child. Sounds like a. The panic, the fear, the worry. This child could be anywhere. It is the wor. It's almost a relief when it just turns into a whodunit. But the way that it then plays out, you know, the sociality between the moms, who, of course, are doing most of the work of making sure there is a sociality between the children and play dates and pickups and this and that, such that everything that has gone, quote, unquote, wrong. Did you vet this nanny? Whose nanny is this? This is why it's called All Her Fault. And I think this goes to your point about the gender prison of the suburbs. So much responsibility, so much household responsibility falls on the shoulders of the women, such that any tragedy can be sort of pointed at them. And you see this hot potato of blame be passed around between the women. It is a really fascinating subject and again, I think deals with a kind of legalism that I think is sometimes epitomized by this kind of. This way of life. When you think about the suburbs, another thing that comes to mind is really the notion of an estate of whatever size you know, ownership of a territory, and somebody has to be the Lord and the lady of this space. And if something goes wrong, somebody pays for it.

[Nomi Frye]

Another thing, you know, to speak to Alex's earlier point about horror, a lot of contemporary shows see the suburbs as a place for, like, violent crime. You know, we have the Apple show you Friends and Neighbors, which has, like, Jon Hamm as a kind of finance guy in a very wealthy suburb who loses his job and begins to steal from his various friends and neighbors. We have Big Little Lies where these women, you know, played by, like, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, et cetera, Laura Dern, live in this, like, very lovely beachside community in California. And much like in DTF St. Louis, there's a murder that starts the series, and then it devolves into this whodunit. There's a sense that there is kind of that darkness finds its voice in actual crime.

[Alex Schwartz]

Yeah. So it's fascinating, I think, that what you're describing has been a trope of art made about the suburbs for a long time. The crime and that there's a secret as opposed to this idea of urban crime, that it lurks beneath the surface. I mean, it's to the point of cliche, frankly. And one thing I do find interesting about talking about the suburbs now is that their composition has really changed. The suburbs were a white phenomenon for decades and decades and decades. And actually the 2020 census showed us that a lot has changed about the racial composition of the suburbs. There's some interesting headlines I'm reading from a Brookings report. Can you even believe. Believe that your friend Alex Schwartz is reading from a Brookings report on our podcast. But stay with me Now. In 1990, roughly 2 out of 10 suburbanites were people of color. This rose to 30% in 2000 and 45% in 2020. So this is a consistent upward trajectory where these places are becoming more diverse, less of the totally lily white facade of American life that a lot of these suburbs texts have put forward. This seems to me like, you know, a really positive development for the suburbs. Like, a lot of the things that we're saying that the suburbs represent, unsurprisingly, could function as metonymy for the country at large. Like, increasing division, anger over small things, inability to talk to neighbors, obsession with personal property, and, like, dehumanizing of the other because of a sense of incursion. Like all these, really. I don't. I don't think it's a surprise at all that MAGA reads as. Even though I wouldn't say MAGA is a suburban phenomenon, but it depicts a kind of suburban fantasy of the 1950s as an ideal for return, as a very powerful symbol. So there does seem to be room for a different depiction. And, in fact, one of the things that I like about DTF St. Louis that I think is cool about it is that, yes, okay, murder is there. And that's, again, like, we've seen a ton of this Big Little Lies, as you said, and on and on and on. But the other thing that's there, you actually find this sweetness beneath the surface. I think that's the thing that's appealing to me about the show, that you find where you don't expect it, this kind of sweetness and generosity that really just surprised me. Yeah.

[Nomi Frye]

Mm.

[Alex Schwartz]

It felt really idiosyncratic and sincere, and that. That's what got me about that show. Could it only happen in the suburbs? I don't think so necessarily. But I think that what makes the show work is this sense of isolation and finding that through isolation, like the chance at friendship doesn't come along very often because everyone's set in their patterns. Like, the suburbs give this impression of adult life that is just totally static. You've made it. All you need to do is maintain it. You're done now.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Forever.

[Alex Schwartz]

Forever.

[Nomi Frye]

Forever.

[Alex Schwartz]

Forever.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Speaking of friendship, didn't you watch a different show, Naomi? That maybe.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, it's not a show. It's the movie Friendship that came out last year, written and directed by Ann, and it's Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. And interestingly, Paul Rudd, much like Jason Bateman in DTF St. Louis, plays a weatherman who moves into this kind of suburban neighborhood and meets his neighbor, Tim Robinson. But being Tim Robinson, something is wrong with him. You know, he's like, too. He's, like, too eager. He really is lonely. He really is lonely. And so he's like, I'm gonna befriend this guy.

[Vincent Cunningham]

Gonna get in there.

[Nomi Frye]

Yeah, I'm gonna get in there. And it obviously ends up being bad. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong. But to your point, Alex, there is something sweet about. Does talk about kind of like a desperate but kind of, like, graspable, understandable, need for connection between people, which. The kind of suburban anime. You know, we often talk about urban anime. Like, oh, I don't know, my neighbors. You know, he's lived across the hall from me for, you know, 17 years. We've never said hi or whatever it is. But I think in this movie, you get a sense of, like, I'm living in the suburbs and I have no community. I'm totally alone. And I want to have a friend. And especially because I'm a man and men don't have friends.

[Vincent Cunningham]

That's right.

[Nomi Frye]

You know, famously. Famously. I mean, obviously some men have friends, but, you know, it's a problem.

[Alex Schwartz]

They could all use more.

[Nomi Frye]

They could all use more.

[Alex Schwartz]

This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with music by Alexis Quadrato. You can find every episode of Critics at [e-mail] Critics. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your face. Feed Is DOGE finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and paths driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nomi Frye]

From prx.