When the streaming wars began, Apple TV+ initially aimed to differentiate itself by forgoing R-rated content in favor of a softer, sweeter, more comforting brand of TV. The network’s new golf comedy, Stick, seems born from that original template: a series whose overwhelming nice-ness serves as both its greatest strength and biggest handicap.
Created by Jason Keller, Stick follows an ex-golfer named Pryce “Stick” Cahill (Owen Wilson) whose promising career was derailed by an explosive mid-tournament meltdown many years ago. Divorced, directionless, and washed up, Stick spots a talented teenage golfer, Santi (Peter Dager), at a local driving range and immediately seizes his chance for redemption. Stick becomes Santi’s coach and the pair pile into an RV along with Santi’s mother, Elena (Mariana Treviño), and Stick’s best friend, Mitts (Marc Maron), to see just how far the kid can go.
Wilson plays the show’s eponymous character with his patented brand of Zen-like dopiness. Stick is a sort of dialectic drunken master: Characters’ attempts to argue with him simply bounce off his easy-going demeanor. Coaching Santi with a steady stream of positive encouragement, Star Wars references, and cheerful “golf is a metaphor for life” monologues, Stick quickly forges a strong rapport with his young protégé.
Everything and everyone in Stick looks as freshly manicured as an Augusta fairway, and it uses all sorts of visual flourishes to add cinematic flair to the world of golfing, including a shot from the POV of a soaring golf ball (shades of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers). Santi’s primary talent is his ability to, in Mitts’s words, “nuke it off the tee,” and there’s something atavistically satisfying about the explosive sound of each perfectly struck drive.
All of this makes Stick an eminently likeable series, but its need to play nice also works against it. For one, it often finds itself trying to foster dramatic conflicts without actually letting its characters fight. Mitts says something to annoy Elena or Stick pushes Santi a little too hard and then they all hug and make up. Because their non-issues are so happily resolved, and without ever creating much friction, the characters never experience any real growth.
In contrast to these half-hearted dramatic scuffles, Stick slowly reveals a dark chapter to Stick’s backstory that sticks out in an otherwise light and cheerful series—like a splash of blood on a Thomas Kinkade painting or a muzak song interrupted by a screamo singer’s howl. This morbid aspect quickly takes on a phantom quality, seeming to exist only in the brief moments when a character explicitly brings it up and vanishing as we return to the show’s cheesy, colorful reality.
Some of Stick’s awkwardness can be attributed to it feeling like an old-fashioned sports movie that’s been reshaped into a 10-episode series. Santi’s story is a classic underdog story with a clearly laid out arc: He and Stick work together, learning from each other and overcoming their personal issues before arriving at the big tournament where all that personal growth can pay off.
And that’s more or less what happens—only we get a lot of trifling, half-baked conflicts and obstacles along the way. It’s narrative clutter that obscures more than it enhances. Santi, for example, is given two cartoonishly villainous father figures to play against, and this redundancy only serves to undermine our sense of what he’s really supposed to be overcoming.
Stick nails the ending, with a big finish that’s cornily brilliant in the way that perhaps only sports stories can be, and it still just about gets there under par. But the series lamentably has to hack its way through a longer, rougher route to get there than it might have liked.
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The show can’t possibly be as cheesy as this last paragraph.