3 min readThe irony of DTF St. Louis, a new HBO prestige drama marinated in suburban languor, is that the murder case central to the plot would sound too good to be true if it ever happened. A TV weatherman whose fling with a colleague’s wife ends in the husband dead after drinking a poisoned Bloody Mary? In a can? It’s the sort of sordidness only Hollywood screenwriters could cook up. But here’s the fun part: DTF St. Louis was, in fact, based on a true story.
The key word being “was.” And even if the show has nothing to do with the real-life story anymore, it’s still a story worth revisiting.
In 2017, The New Yorker published the nonfiction feature “My Dentist’s Murder Trial,” written by James Lasdun. In the piece, Lasdun invites the reader into a deadly love triangle set against upstate middle-class New York. Lasdun was a patient of Dr. Gilberto Nunez, who on October 15, 2015 was indicted for the murder of his friend, a physical therapist named Thomas Kolman of Saugerties, New York.
Nunez had an affair with Kolman’s wife, Linda. But after Linda became resolved to fix her marriage, Nunez went to extreme lengths to break them up. His efforts included catfishing as a woman named Samantha and posing as a CIA operative. In November 2011, Kolman’s body was found in a Planet Fitness parking lot with trace amounts of midazolam, a “sedative used only by doctors and dentists,” writes Lasdun. Lasdun’s article ends with enough uncertainty to doubt that Nunez is really culpable in Kolman’s death. (Nunez was ultimately convicted with forgery and insurance fraud charges.)
Fast forward to 2022, and Lasdun’s story entered into development as a TV series with David Harbour and Pedro Pascal attached to star. Deadline reported Pascal was to play Nunez, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic and whose trial was steeped in perceived racism against him. By 2024, Variety reported that Pascal dropped out of the project and that the show was retooled to stand alone, “based on a wholly original idea with no connection to the original article.”
As for why the show strayed from its true crime origins, an answer comes from series writer, showrunner, and executive producer Steven Conrad. In a February 28 interview with Slashfilm, Conrad said he and his creative partners felt uneasy about giving certain attributes, like character flaws and even bedroom kinks, to real-life people.
DTF St. Louis isn’t based on a true story anymore, but the story that brought it into development is still worth reading now.
“I wanted to find suspense in a normal setting, and looking to find some story about some middle-aged desperation,” Conrad said. “David [Harbour] and I had started collaborating and trying to figure out a way to work together. David brought me that specific [The New Yorker] article and a couple others, and we just started getting our hands dirty with the story and trying to figure out how do you build a world that can hold an audience steady for seven hours with a dilemma and then another dilemma and then another dilemma?”
In inventing dilemma after dilemma, the writers felt it was wrong to say that the show could still be based on a true story. “None of us felt comfortable about making up qualities and then attributing them to real people,” Conrad explained. “So we thought we ought to call it, start over, maintain that instance that got us together anyway, which is suspense in a suburban setting, and see what we could do if we just leaned into make-believe.”
While DTF St. Louis bears no resemblance to the Nunez case anymore, the parallels are striking as they are obvious. No, Jason Bateman isn’t playing an immigrant dentist, and David Harbour’s body isn’t found in a gym’s parking lot. But it’s still a show about the humiliation of betrayals, and a sexual affair born of frustration, dissatisfaction, numbing boredom against the purgatory of the mundane. Which is why Lasdun’s piece is still a compelling read all these years later. It’s so good, it could still work as a TV show.
