Steven Conrad finds good comedy in lonely people trying to improve their lives, and we value the care he takes with them. His dialogue sometimes strains for oddness, and his characters can be better company than his plotting allows.
Fi1m perspective
In DTF St. Louis (2026), two middle-aged men explore affairs through a dating app, with friendship becoming as important as sex. Steven Conrad gives their awkwardness time and takes the wish for company seriously. We like him most when he lets these people be lonely without making them ridiculous for it. His comedy is worth the occasional wait, though the peculiar dialogue can make an ordinary hurt sound rehearsed.
The interest in dissatisfied lives was there in his screenplay for The Weather Man (2005), with its personal crisis in the Midwest. He also wrote The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), before directing the corporate-rivalry comedy The Promotion (2008). Television became his main field from 2015, through Patriot (2015–2018), Perpetual Grace, LTD (2019) and Ultra City Smiths (2021). Writing and directing his television work gives him control over how closely the jokes sit beside the darker material.
In DTF St. Louis, that mixture works best between Jason Bateman’s Clark Forrest and David Harbour’s Floyd Smernitch. Their friendship gives the jokes about middle age enough weight to matter. We were more moved than we expected by Harbour, because he makes Floyd’s wish for company seem painfully ordinary even when the dialogue strains for oddness. Linda Cardellini’s Carol Love-Smernitch brings enough comic force to make the love triangle compete with the men’s friendship.
Conrad also knows when to leave some of the comedy to the setting. James Whitaker’s cinematography and Laura Fox’s production design make the ordinary Midwestern surroundings useful: these are unglamorous places for sex and betrayal. That helps us understand the wish to start again without believing that another partner will put everything right. Alex Wurman supplies the music, but the actors do the more persuasive work of making us care.
The difficulty comes when Conrad moves between coarse humour and tenderness. In DTF St. Louis, those shifts can be awkward, the eccentricity becomes laboured, and the investigation sometimes slows a comedy whose friendships are more involving than its mystery. Yet he takes care over people who could easily have been reduced to dirty jokes, which gives us reason to stay through the slower stretches. Start there for Harbour and Bateman, with some patience for the plotting.
Biography
Steven Conrad is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1968, he briefly attended Florida State University before transferring to Northwestern University.
At the age of 19 he sold his first screenplay, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993). His later screenplays include The Weather Man (2005), The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) and Wonder (2017). He wrote and directed the feature The Promotion (2008) and created the series Patriot (2015–2018) and Perpetual Grace, LTD (2019).
Conrad wrote and directed the 2026 HBO miniseries DTF St. Louis.
