Focus on Owen Wilson’s charm and you’ll get through golf sitcom Stick
You could probably watch ep 1, close your eyes, and imagine what happens next.
Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: six-ish hours of Owen Wilson talking about golf.
Apple TV+’s new sitcom Stick is the monkey’s paw answer to Severance and The Studio. You wanted dystopian sci-fi with a labyrinthine plot and existential stakes? You wanted a Hollywood satire that actually sticks the knife in? Fine, but in return you have to watch six-ish hours of Owen Wilson talking about golf. This is exactly what Apple TV+ looks like when it’s decided to be apathetic – which isn’t to say that Stick is outrightly bad, but that it is predictable enough of a sports series that you could get the same mileage out of it by simply watching the first episode, closing your eyes, and imagining what happens next.
But, here’s the trick – Apple TV+ will always frontline these kinds of shows with an A-list name doing something you, admittedly, quite want to see them do. When Apple TV+ asked me if I wanted to watch Billy Crystal play a haunted but curmudgeonly child psychiatrist, I couldn’t help but say yes. And when Apple TV+ asked me if I wanted to watch Owen Wilson play a washed-up, genial sportsman with a traumatic past, I couldn’t help but say yes again. I love a washed-up, genial Wilson character with a traumatic past! He’s brilliant when he’s doing it in a Wes Anderson film. And, if we can’t aim for that, we can at least aim for Lightning McQueen (god, if only he were playing the actual golf club in this).
Related reading:
* Before’s unmistakable thrill of the camp
* Season 2 made Severance richer, more loveable
* The Studio: Rogen’s satire is the real deal
And, in practice, both Crystal and Wilson are extremely watchable in their respective series, without those series actually amounting to anything substantial. To enjoy Stick, you’re best off disassociating slightly and focusing purely on the natural charm Wilson brings to the role of Pryce Cahill, former golf champion and ex-husband to a Judy Greer character (what an honour). He’s a stoned-out prophet of the green, dropping morsels of wisdom like, “the course becomes a cathedral and you become baptised by a higher power”, and acting like a total goofball right up until the point you accidentally breach the topic of his dead kid.
Wilson’s Pryce is as laidback but vulnerable as you want him to be, and when he sees promise in a preternaturally talented kid like Santi (Peter Dager), you see that little flicker of hope ignite in his eyes. That’s classic Wilson. And the show does let those golf balls fly around with electric speed – the camera’s buried down in the lawn, then it’s up in the sky, then it’s crash zooming into somebody’s gobsmacked expression.
But Stick, created by Jason Keller, who also co-wrote Le Mans ’66 (AKA Ford v. Ferrari), actually only has about two hours of genuine sports movie material. When you’re told in episode one that Santi lost his love for the sport because his emotionally abusive dad, his first teacher, packed up and left the family – well, it’s a little tiresome having to wait nine more episodes for the thing you know is going to happen to happen.
And what Stick does have to offer in the sitcom space, in order to beef up that runtime, is pure middle-aged, liberal man bait: some references to Simon & Garfunkel and a gentle ribbing of Gen Z’s fundamental existence. That’s how we get Zero (Lilli Kay), a self-described “gender queer anti-capitalist post-colonial feminist” with she/they pronouns. They cause incessant confusion for Pryce’s former caddy and current best friend Mitts (Marc Maron), while serving as a love interest for Santi. He, in turn, then routinely turns around and treats them like shit for no other reason than they’re an easy target for dramatic tension.
At some point towards the end, Timothy Olyphant turns up with that devilish grin of his. Santi’s mother, Elena (Mariana Treviño), makes a feminist stand in defence of investing in helium. These are not things anyone’s going to remember about Stick in a few weeks’ time. All that will linger, inevitably, is the cosy image of Wilson in a half-zip jumper standing next to a golf cart. And that’s all Stick ever promised.
