Much ink has been spilled, and countless TikToks recorded, in an effort to explain the female fervor unleashed by the series “Heated Rivalry.” I, a thirty-eight-year-old woman who owns a T-shirt that bears the logo of Shane Hollander’s Montreal Metros and another that celebrates Ilya Rozanov’s Boston Raiders (Valentine’s Day gifts, it should be said, from my indulgent husband), don’t find its appeal so mystifying. Two gorgeous young men, as elegantly muscled as Myron’s discus thrower, have ecstatically unbridled, mutually satisfying sex to a soundtrack designed to tickle elder millennials’ nostalgia-pleasure centers, all while falling in the kind of soul-sustaining love that most of us can only dream of. The bodies: hot. The feelings: tender. The hockey: minimal. What’s not to like?

I thought of “Heated Rivalry” recently while finishing “DTF St. Louis,” a seven-episode HBO show that deals, rather differently, with the liberatory potential of men’s love for one another. When it began, the show seemed to promise a fairly conventional murder mystery. Floyd Smernitch (David Harbour), an American Sign Language interpreter, and Clark Forrest (Jason Bateman), a TV weatherman in a suburb of St. Louis, meet on the job and become fast friends. At a lawn party devoted to the game of cornhole, Clark flirts with Floyd’s wife and the two soon begin an affair, meeting for afternoon assignations at the local Quality Garden Suites. Meanwhile, Clark introduces Floyd to DTF St. Louis, an app that facilitates hookups between discreet adults. By the end of the first episode, Floyd is dead, apparently poisoned in the locker room of the public pool where he had arranged an early-morning rendezvous with TigerTiger, a match from the app. TigerTiger’s profile is soon revealed to have been created by Clark, presumably for the purpose of catfishing Floyd; when detectives find security-camera footage of Clark pedalling away from the scene of the crime in his distinctive recumbent bicycle, he is arrested and charged with the murder.

Naturally, nothing is as it first appears. As Clark spins his story in the interrogation room, suspicion starts to shift to Floyd’s wife, Carol Love-Smernitch (Linda Cardellini). Floyd, a kind husband who managed to form a bond with Carol’s misfit adolescent son, was nonetheless dead weight when it came to the household’s finances. He also had Peyronie’s disease, whose primary symptom—a dramatically curved penis—may have inhibited the couple’s sex life. Could Carol, who supplements her income as an employee at Purina’s corporate headquarters by umpiring Little League games, have wanted Floyd out of the picture so that she could collect life insurance and ride Clark happily ever after into the Midwestern sunset?

This premise, bolstered by excellent performances all around, could easily have sustained a totally enjoyable TV show. But what turns “DTF St. Louis” from a fine show into a fascinating one is the curious nature of the relationship between the two men at its core. Before he meets Floyd, Clark is the image of stultifying middle age on autopilot. His life revolves around his undemanding, all-but-obsolete job; in a perfect, perverse detail, he and his wife exchange high-fives in greeting and farewell as if they were teammates rather than spouses. Even his affair with Carol, which involves a goofy kink featuring sex-robot role-play and a proclivity for what Clark primly refers to as “weight placement” (Carol’s, on Clark’s face), is nothing more than the latest cliché in a life defined by them.

Floyd is something different: an openhearted naïf who insists on embracing the indifferent world in spite of its endless disappointments. When he joins DTF St. Louis, Floyd—a single-entendre guy if ever there was one—chooses Rocksolid as his username because, as he tells Clark, “I feel like I’m a pretty dependable person.” In the third episode—the show weaves back and forth in time, as the progress of the police investigation is augmented and undercut by flashbacks revealing the true nature of events—we see Floyd go to a diner for a breakfast date with Modern Love, his first (and only) match from the app. Modern Love used a photo of David Bowie in a long dress as his profile picture, and so the ingenuous, myopic Floyd expects a woman. In fact, Modern Love is a man; after their meal, he kisses Floyd in the parking lot, an experience that sends Floyd reeling. Later, at a gym, where Floyd and Clark discuss the situation while squatting and thrusting in comically erotic proximity, Floyd shares that he “Frenched” Modern Love not out of lust, or even curiosity, but out of sympathy. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” he explains, “and feel like it was not cool or it was inappropriate for us to do that if he wanted to do that.” Floyd’s sincerity, the startling extremity of his concern for the comfort of others, snaps Clark out of his depressed, and depressing, complacency. It stirs his soul. “I loved Floyd,” he tells the detectives, as the camera cuts to a shot of Floyd, shirtless, embracing Clark and telling him the same thing.

There is a fantastical, science-fiction aspect to “DTF St. Louis.” It’s as if these two middle-aged American men grew up in a world in which the phrase “no homo” was never uttered; in which two heterosexual men frankly and repeatedly confessing their feelings for another is not taboo, or suspect, or even a little bit weird. (In a resonant bit of casting, Modern Love is played by Peter Sarsgaard, who was so terrifying, at the start of his career, as John Lotter, the Nebraskan ex-con who rapes and murders the trans man Brandon Teena, played by Hilary Swank, in the 1999 film “Boys Don’t Cry.” In that Midwestern story, difference was a threat punishable by death. Here, it is treated as a straightforward fact of life.) It is far easier for the detectives investigating Floyd’s death to imagine that he was secretly gay and leading a double life than it is for them to grasp the less salacious but more bizarre truth, and that may be true for viewers, too.

Analyzing the passionate response to “Heated Rivalry,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel used the term “corrective experience” to explain the series’ cathartic effect on so much of its audience. By the end of that show, the anxiety and isolation that freight life in the closet had burned away, leaving a happy, hopeful ending in place of familiar narrative disaster; love is found, secrecy is banished, and all is well. “DTF St. Louis” offers the tempting possibility of similar rewards in a less conventional framework. Determined to “B out the B”—“bring out the best” in each other—Floyd and Clark exchange compliments and confidences; they take a wine-tasting bike trip together and glide beneath the dappled foliage, holding hands. Even Clark’s affair with Carol turns out to have a part for Floyd to play. What would it look like, the show seems to ask, if straight men could access, without shame, the kind of emotional and physical closeness that is generally the province of close female friendships? “I feel safe,” Floyd tells Clark, of their relationship. Trying on a kind of spiritual drag, these guys find something that looks like freedom.

But desire refuses to relinquish its demands. Floyd wants to be loved, and not just platonically. He is concerned about his weight: he can’t stop comparing his present, stocky self with the nude photos taken in his prime and published as an Indiana Jones-themed centerfold in Playgirl. In spite of their closeness, both he and Clark confess that they suffer from persistent loneliness. In one sad scene, Floyd and Carol begin to make love, only for Carol to pull away in repulsion. Floyd longs to be wanted again—to be with Carol “full on,” Peyronie’s be damned—and it is Clark’s frankly deranged attempt to help fulfill this wish, to prove to his friend that he is as lovable to the rest of the world as he is to Clark, that leads to tragedy.

Harbour, by all appearances, has fully committed himself to the physicality of his role. Not since Tony Soprano stood semi-naked by his fridge, pawing at a plate of gabagool, can I recall seeing such a big, bare male body so ogled by the camera. In “The Sopranos,” Tony’s girth was a mark of masculinity, of dominance. For Floyd, in this era of GLP-1s and looksmaxxing, it’s a blatant sign of failure. The roughly thirty-pound latex belly that Harbour wore to give Floyd extra heft is on full display in the show’s final episode, when Floyd and Clark strip down to their boxer briefs and dance by the pool lockers in a kind of tête-à-tête disco. After the idyllic variations of the male form on display in “Heated Rivalry,” it’s hilarious and strangely sublime to watch these two aging bodies, one effortfully trim, the other big and unruly, bump awkwardly around in the dark. It’s not the cottage, but it’ll do.

On the evening that I watched this scene, Lily Allen, Harbour’s ex-wife, was nearby at King’s Theatre in Brooklyn, performing on her West End Girl tour. On her 2025 album of the same name, Allen gave a semi-autobiographical account of the couple’s breakup owing, in her telling, to Harbour’s emotional manipulation and sexual infidelity. (He stands accused of that most modern of romantic crimes: pressuring his partner into an open relationship to facilitate erotic betrayal.) In that light, Harbour’s choice to take on the role of Floyd seems like a canny public-relations coup. It’s hard to think of a more sympathetic recent straight-male character on television; it’s enough to make you suspect that Harbour may not merely be playing Floyd but wearing him as a kind of disguise.

Still, the show itself doesn’t let Floyd so easily off the hook. His apparently boundless sympathy for others stops short of his own wife. Carol loves him; she’s also exasperated by his failure to sustain his share of their domestic life, to do the basic caretaking that marriage entails. Floyd says he’ll cancel the lawn guy to help the family save money; he forgets. He’s up for a big job; he skips the interview. Floyd, distraught by his own physical failures, is nevertheless repulsed by the sight of Carol in her big, burly ump gear. He builds Clark up while letting her down. The barbed fact is that the woman caught in the middle of this unusual male arrangement benefits from none of their newfound emotional enlightenment. “I want your dreams,” Carol tells Clark at the start of their affair, the better to make them come true. Cardellini plays Carol as strategically seductive, a woman who can sparkle when she must. Her own dreams are modest: bills paid, tuition covered, a new set of sheets. She gets what she’s after, but somehow she’s still left holding the bag. ♦