resembles

I’m confident that I’ll make my way through The Times’ best breakfast burrito list and devour another couple dozen worthy candidates before I’ll ever have the chance to ride on that chronically delayed LAX people mover.

“Ninety-nine percent done”? Sounds like the answer my kids would give me the night before a big homework assignment was due.

Maybe our next breakfast burrito list can be “Best breakfast burritos near John Wayne Airport.” Or Hollywood Burbank. Or Long Beach. The possibilities are endless. No doubt we have got time until that “one percent” gets checked off.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of the Envelope newsletter, and the guy pondering a “DTF Los Angeles” where the characters inch along the LAX horseshoe, kindling all manner of sinister thoughts.

Cover story: ‘DTF St. Louis’

(Erik Carter / For The Times)

Are TV viewers a little more judgmental when it comes to complicated women?

Linda Cardellini would always know where someone was on their “DTF St. Louis” viewing journey based on their vibe when they approached her.

“If they were halfway through the show, they usually weren’t warming up to Carol and you could feel that energy,” Cardellini says, talking with me for a recent Envelope cover story on the limited series. “But if they were through with the show, that energy changed. Sometimes you could tell they felt bad that they didn’t like her in the first place.”

Carol, as you know if you’ve watched “DTF,” the season’s best limited series, is an overworked suburban mother forced to umpire Little League games because her job at Purina doesn’t pay enough to cover the bills. She’s married to gentle giant Floyd (David Harbour), an ASL interpreter and a sensitive stepfather to her son. But it’s a sexless marriage, so she turns to local weatherman Clark (Jason Bateman), who possesses a vitality long absent in her husband.

“DTF St. Louis” is ostensibly a murder mystery. Floyd dies in the first episode. Writer-director Steven Conrad employs a fair bit of misdirection, pointing our suspicions first to Clark and then to Carol. Since money is tight and Floyd had an insurance policy, Carol is a logical enough person of interest. We learn that she has a criminal record. And she was cheating.

“When I was reading the episodes, I thought, ‘Oh, OK. It’s going to be Carol, even though there’s so many clues telling you that it’s not her,” Cardellini says. “But we’re conditioned to think that. Like, ‘She had to be after the money,’ even though she never accepts any gifts as she’s struggling financially. Everyone just believed the worst in her.”

Granted, Carol could be a little brusque with service workers, and her passive-aggressive approach to police questioning (“Can you speak up?”) was a master class in control and manipulation that I plan to use if I’m ever interrogated for some crime I’m sure I did not do. (Unless it’s somehow related to picking someone up at LAX. Then all bets are off.)

Reviews for “DTF” too often would note how it’s a poignant look at male loneliness in the suburbs when, in fact, Carol is the most isolated character on the show.

“Carol is immensely lonely, but she’s so burdened by the heavy demand of keeping this household afloat that she doesn’t have the luxury to notice that she doesn’t have a friend,” says Conrad. “The job of bailing water is hers alone.”

In that respect, Carol brings to mind Skyler White on “Breaking Bad” and Carmela Soprano from “The Sopranos,” forlorn women dealing with the man-child they married and getting flak from viewers for being a killjoy.

By the end of “DTF,” we find we should have been on Carol’s side all along.

“It’s a beautiful magic trick,” says co-star Bateman.

Just the latest feat of illusion from the talented Cardellini, one that could result in her first Emmy win next month.