(courtesy IMP Awards)
Ostensibly, Stick is all about golf.
Watch the trailer and even dive into the first five episodes and you will come across many discussions about why golf matters, how to play it well and what it means to the soul as well as the body.
But, and this is important if you’re not enamoured of the game and cannot tell a “birdie” from a “bogey”, Stick is not wholly about golf, and so, if you’re like this sports-disliking reviewer and have no time for golf, among a great many other sporting pursuits, then you need to know that at its heart, this series, created by Jason Keller, is not just about golf.
Billed as the new Ted Lasso – not strictly speaking true; true there is wisdom, raw humanity and whimsy at times but this is a show more akin to Glow or some other American comedy-drama than the charming delight that is Ted Lasso – Stick is a show about redemption and why finding your way back to yourself is harder than it looks but vitally necessary.
At the centre of the story is Pryce “Stick” Cahill (Owen Wilson), a once superlatively good professional golfer who had a meltdown on the links back in 2009 at the height of his Tiger Woods-equivalent successful career and who was forced to walk away from the game he loved.
At the time, Cahill was married to Amber-Linn Sobeck (Judy Greer), had a sprawling house in the suburbs and the world of golf at his feet; 16 or so years later he’s coaching old women seeking to improve their game at the driving range and sweet-talking people who will never play golf into buying ridiculously expensive sets of clubs.
His career, and his life is on the skids – he is separated from Amber-Linn, with whom he maintains a cordial if sometimes fraught relationship, and he shows no signs of trying to regain anything like his former glory – and despite urging from his ex-wife and best friend/caddy Mitts (Marc Maron), he shows no signs of making any moves to rebuild what has been profoundly lost.
Then one day at the driving range, Pryce, brought to flawed and lovably broken life by Wilson at the top of his, ahem, game, notices a teenager hitting balls far off into the distance with a skill that suggests he is good enough to make it in the big leagues (to steal the parlance of a wholly unrelated sport).
Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager) works at a local supermarket and like Pryce, has shelved his previous greatness – he was once a fearsomely talented junior player with boxes full of trophies to his name – in favour of middling through, only hitting balls, without the knowledge of his single mum, Elena (Mariana Treviño), on his own time and, it needs to be noted, without the permission of the driving range.
Here are two many, years apart in age and life experience, who actually have more in common that either will admit, and after some fast talking and wheeling and dealing, Pryce convinces Elena to let Santi to try and qualify for the amateur golf circuit where Pryce is sure renewed glories await.
But while Pryce comes alive again and can finally see some sort of useful future for himself again, it takes some arguing for Santi, who is plagued by the aftereffects of trauma (as, it needs to be noted, is Pryce), to take up the game again and for Elena to agree to let him try to renew his love affair with golf which has taken by some terrible family machinations.
Stick becomes a road trip of sorts as Mitts very reluctantly agrees to ferry everyone about in his Winnebago, which itself is a symbol of the grief and pain which dogs him, and they set out, picking up along the way anti-capitalist, gender-queer 20-year-old iconoclast, Zero (Lilli Kay) as Santi’s girlfriend and caddy, to redeem a whole lot of lives and hopes and dreams.
That’s not the stated intent in fact, and there’s one point where Mitts and Pryce have it out and quickly reconcile – they are at heart brothers so any disagreement is short-lived but furiously expressed – because none of the people involved can really say how wounded and lost they are.
But wounded and lost is precisely what they are, and Stick, in its own genial, slightly goofy but often emotionally intense way, brings that to the fore over and over, stressing that while there may be some healing in the offing, that it will be hard-won and easily lost.
This is not some charming romp into an untroubled future.
While Stick is full of hope and a sense of the world coming alive, quite unexpectedly, again, it doesn’t pretend for a second that you can simply ignore or walk away from the trauma inflicted on you, no matter how good the found family is that is slowly, if a little messily coalescing around you.
For the most part, Stick marries the lingering of the past and a desperate need for a better future together well, bundling them into a show which is genial and warm and lovely on the surface but which has the dark pain of things lost forever always swirling slowly below just out of reach but always close enough to cause some damage in the here and now.
What really makes this show work is that, for all the flawed nature of all the characters, especially Pryce, who makes some poor decisions in these five episodes in pursuit of a dazzling new life, Stick is full of people who want that second chance, who need that second chance, and who want to believe it’s not just possible but well within their nascent grasp.
The show hints that it won’t be this easy of course but it’s the fact that it’s a show about the redemptive power of belief in a better future that really makes it sing, and that it’s full of people who, like us, want to trust in the idea that you can make it back from supposedly life-ending mistakes or trauma, and that maybe it will work out and you can sing again.
But Stick is also about the compromises we make, and the lies we tell ourselves to craft these maybe happy-ever-afters and you can rest assured that the back half of the season is going to test how hard it is to reach that future and whether you can hang onto it even if you somehow manage to find it.
Stick streams on AppleTV+