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With Stick, Owen Wilson gets caught in the sand trap of shallow television

Apple TV+'s new sports comedy feels frustratingly half-hearted.

With Stick, Owen Wilson gets caught in the sand trap of shallow television
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The tagline for Apple TV+’s Stick is “Take a big swing.” It’s too bad the reason the show doesn’t work is because of how much it fails to live up to that idea creatively, seemingly content to take little, half-hearted swings at comedy, character, and emotion, most of which never even make contact with the ball.

The series starts promisingly enough with a premiere that centers star Owen Wilson in a role he plays well: the lovable loser with one more chance to win. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris of Little Miss Sunshine fame, it’s a reasonably entertaining table setter for a meal that never comes. It quickly becomes apparent that Stick is a show that didn’t get out of the concept phase, leaning into melodrama and shallow characters instead of giving viewers anything honestly emotional or even funny to hold onto. Stick is clearly designed to hit the same audiences as Ted Lasso and Shrinking (other series about middle-aged guys overcoming life’s trauma to be better versions of themselves, which is truly becoming a part of the Apple TV+ brand), but it only reminds one how much better those shows are at what they do.

Wilson plays Pryce Cahill, an average guy who works at a sporting-goods store in Indiana. He has modest struggles with his ex-wife (portrayed by the under-utilized Judy Greer), but he seems like a decent dude dealing with barely hidden grief, which we quickly learn is due to the unimaginable loss of a child. When he hears a young golfer named Santi (Peter Dager) taking swings off the tee, he can sense immediately that there’s something special in that swoosh sound. When he challenges him to hit a few targets on the driving range, he realizes that Santi’s distance and accuracy place him firmly in the “phenom” category and he decides to try to hitch his wagon to this new Tiger Woods. This puts him  on the road with Santi, Pryce’s buddy Mitts (Marc Maron), Santi’s mom Elena (Mariana Treviño), and, before long, a character who serves as a love interest and caddy for Santi named Zero (played by the show-stealing Lilli Kay).

Zero is indicative of many of the writing problems on Stick. While Yellowstone and Your Honor vet Kay does a lot with very little, Zero is a character who we only really learn anything about in the context of the roles they play in Pryce and Santi’s lives. Pryce basically hires them to serve as a conduit to get his advice to the stubborn Santi, who then falls for Zero before treating them like absolute garbage when his feelings get hurt. Everything about Zero’s arc feels shallow and simplified for comedy television instead of like any actual exploration of generation gaps, young love, and even gender roles, issues that this show constantly flirts with but doesn’t saying anything about.

The generation-gap material is particularly egregious. There is something to be said for actors playing to their strengths, but what Wilson and Maron are doing here feels more lazy than anything else. Their characters can often barely hide their disdain for younger folks, with Maron’s Mitts moaning about pronouns and people who don’t eat red meat, the kind of comedy one would expect from a Tim Allen sitcom.  

The biggest problem is that there isn’t a charismatic counter to the grumblings of the old men on this comedy golf course. No offense to Dager, who may shine elsewhere, but Santi is boring. For Stick to work, Santi needs to be the center of everything, a charismatic young man who audiences want to root for on and off the course. He’s quite simply not, which, again, is more a product of thin writing than Dager’s skills. Santi mumbles things like “I’m not a little kid anymore” out of the sports-phenom playbook, but nothing about him feels shaded in backstory or depth. And the show feels particularly gross when it gets manipulative regarding Pryce’s lost child and how he’s trying to replace the boy he couldn’t watch grow up with Santi. This might have worked in a show that took both characters seriously, but it feels like cheap heartstring-pulling in one that doesn’t seem to care about them.

While it lowers the pain of watching this 10-episode season, the overall frustration about Stick missing its target feels almost amplified by the few times that creator Jason Keller and his team find the hole. Timothy Olyphant pops up late in the season as a sort-of villain who injects the meandering comedy with some much-needed energy. As for the regulars, Lilli Kay gives one of those turns that makes one want to see them with better material, and Mariana Treviño pushes through the inconsistent writing of her character to find some truth in the expression of a woman who hasn’t been taken seriously. (A scene in which Elena explains to Mitts why she’s investing in helium after he writes it off as a flight of fancy is one of the show’s best and most comedically unexpected.)

Presuming enough Owen Wilson and Marc Maron fans make the first season of Stick a success, a second season could fix some of the show’s problems—namely, by upping the ambition, trusting the cast to do more, and treating young characters like people instead of ways to push gen-gap comedy buttons or heal the trauma of older men. Maybe it can live up its own tagline and take a big swing. Even a medium one would do.      

Stick premieres June 4 on Apple TV+   

 
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