One of the best TV surprises of the year so far has been DTF St. Louis, a twisty dramedy-mystery with especially strong roles for TV mainstays Jason Bateman, David Harbour, and Linda Cardellini. The creative force behind the scenes of the show is creator Steven Conrad, who has never really had a buzzy TV hit before; previous shows of his have included Patriot; Perpetual Grace, LTD; and Ultra City Smiths. I’d never heard of those, either. But certain elements of DTF St. Louis felt familiar anyway because of his work as a screenwriter – specifically from his little-seen 2005 film The Weather Man, which is currently streaming on Paramount Plus.
It’s right there in the title: Like Jason Bateman’s character on DTF, David Spritz (Nicolas Cage) is a weather man going through some midlife-crisis issues, though he’s more akin to the clumsy, well-meaning sign-language interpreter played by David Harbour on that show, rather than Bateman’s smoother local celebrity. Like the former, Spritz – who changed his name for TV, which he thinks some of his viewers can tell, allowing them to clock him as a phony – also makes for an awkward parental figure, fumbling through conversations with his two kids (including a young Nicholas Hoult).
Despite the similarities and similarly Midwest location, The Weather Man isn’t quite as pay-cable steamy as the world of DTF St. Louis, with its sex apps, fantasies, and longing for connection. Spritz has bouts of middle-aged-guy horniness (and accompanying selfishness), but you get the sense that there might have been more of that material in an earlier draft of the screenplay. (Spritz alludes to being a sort of low-effort ladies’ man but we only see one brief episode of evidence.) Cage, though rarely shy about giving himself over to the role, takes a more buttoned-up, existential approach to this man’s combination of broadcast-ready polish and sad-eyed ennui. On TV, he’s smooth and well-prompted. In life, his words come out garbled, profane, frequently interrupted – the kind of frustrated dialogue Conrad specializes in (recall, for just one example, how Harbour’s DTF character repeatedly refers to a board game’s mini-hourglass as his “sand time”). It’s a more comically heightened version of real-life inarticulation; Cage takes to it with natural musicality, including some surprisingly terrific voiceover.
Spritz is a TV personality haunted by an understanding exactly why some people process their recognition of him by chucking milkshakes or sodas at him: “I receive a large reward for pretty much zero effort and contribution.” In the context of the post-American Beauty years, this may have initially come across as one more absurdly well-off upper-middle-class white guy whining about the emptiness he senses beneath his cushy life, without the cathartic tragedy that allowed people to leave that Sam Mendes movie feeling like they’d experienced something profound. But 20-plus years later, The Weather Man feels more relatable in its depiction of a guy who just can’t quite manage to say or do the right thing, expending too much effort or not enough of it, depending on which would be worse in the situation. It’s also an interesting flipside to the most successful Conrad-penned feature, The Pursuit of Happyness, where circumstances kept intervening in the life of a talented go-getter played by Will Smith.
Both movies are weirdly unapologetic about the accumulation of wealth, though The Weather Man seems to be tacitly aware of how Spritz’s white privilege has helped him ascend anyway, despite frequently saying the wrong thing. Conrad also seems genuinely fascinated by non-experts who broadcast their passing knowledge; Harbour’s character on DTF is an enthusiastic ASL interpreter, and gives his job his all, but he’s not quite steeped enough in it to be called an expert (nor, more to the story’s point, to make a full living doing it). Similarly, perhaps more damningly, Spritz does make a living as a TV weather man despite not having a degree in meteorology. When he does attempt to learn more about what he’s reporting, the actual meteorologist at his station mostly shrugs him off. Weather is unpredictable. It defies expertise, at least in this telling.
Spritz has other reasons to feel like a disappointment; his father Robert (Michael Caine), a celebrated prize-winning novelist, all but tells him so. Caine, trying on an American accent, gives a masterful performance of disapproval, both funny and maddening because he never raises his voice or even directly puts his son down. Instead, he affects a plainspoken voice of reason; what he actually says manages to be insightfully direct (“easy doesn’t enter into grown-up life”), intensely judgmental, condescending (by treating all of Spritz’s problems as self-evidently simple to solve), and erudite to the point of obnoxiousness (he claims to not know what a Frosty is, and seems baffled that anyone would know) – in quick succession or sometimes all at once. He frequently behaves as if he is proctoring a test and continually disappointed that his son hasn’t yet caught on. Yet the movie isn’t about the two men reaching a mutual understanding and self-improvement so much as a gradual coming to terms with those disappointments as a naturally occurring part of life.
Conrad didn’t direct The Weather Man himself; that job went to Gore Verbinski, who gives it the icy but not quite shiny tones of a snowfall after it’s been kicked around, of cracks formed within a frost. (Verbinski, it should be noted, is also back with new material in 2026; his movie Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was in theaters earlier this year and is now available to buy or rent on VOD.) It remains his smallest-scale movie, and one of his lowest-grossing – understandably, given its morose tone. If it came out now, it would probably bomb even harder, in far fewer theaters, and someone might say that it should have been a streaming series instead. In some ways, DTF St. Louis feels like it is that series. But there’s something fitting about The Weather Man only lasting 100 minutes, rather than sprawling out with lots of entertaining ins and outs. We don’t often get the ceremony than a multi-part mystery – or as much time as we’d like before the winds shift.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
Stream The Weather Man on Paramount+