First Impressions: Stick (Apple TV+)

Stick
Created and written by Jason Keller (Episode 3 co-written with Christopher Moynihan)
Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and David Dobkin (Episode 3)
Airs Wednesdays on Apple TV+; three episodes watched for review

I’ve always thought golf a natural fit for a television series; cheaper to produce sports sequences than basketball or baseball, easier to film than athletic, movement-based sports like ballet or cheerleading, and something that, because of its lack of helmets, is a lot more personal than football or hockey – throw in some of the underlying existential philosophies of golf, those based around the concept of zen or the lessons of the Bhagavad Gita (like the seminal golf film The Legend of Bagger Vance – a much better film than people gave it credit for in 2000), and the possibilities to build engrossing characters and narratives around the game of golf seem abundantly obvious.

On the surface, Stick, Apple TV+’s new golf dramedy, seems to grasp these concepts; starring Owen Wilson as Pryce Cahill, a down-on-his-luck golf pro who stumbles upon a potential teen prodigy, Stick‘s first three hours occasionally tap into these ideas in effective ways. Unfortunately, those moments are found between long stretches of saccharine, repetitive storytelling, too timid to dig into the conflicts it suggests are at the heart of its narrative, while constantly indulging itself in the kind of navel-gazing, feel-good storytelling that plagued the latter seasons of Ted Lasso (thankfully, this show does not have a therapist character, which is rarer than you’d think in 2025). There are hints of a really good show here, one that isn’t content to back away from more interesting, complex stories and characters, even within the framework of the familiar tropes and cliches of the genre it openly embraces – but these first three episodes are too willing to walk away from the shadows lingering on the corners of its stories, suggesting a level of depth with its storytelling that it never really quite engages with.

Stick does start off on the right foot, centering itself on an Owen Wilson performance that does a fairly good job from avoiding the iconic Wilson-isms of the past; and though Cahill is a pastiche of incredibly predictable character traits (he’s messy, self-destructive, and more than a little selfish), Wilson embodies the character with a dogged, slowly fading optimism, one that Cahill carefully clings to whenever the world throws him another shit sandwich, be it his amicable ex-wife (a thoroughly underused Judy Greer, who I loved in Reboot and haven’t seen since) trying to move on with her life, a YouTube clip of an on-course meltdown that continuously haunts him… or, of course, the personal tragedy that forms the core of Cahill’s journey at the genesis of the series.

It is a mostly great performance, and one that isn’t incredibly showy or self-aggrandizing – which gives Stick a bit of room to let Cahill be a bit performative, a bit overly loquacious without it drowning out the other performances at the core, which include the aforementioned golf prodigy Santi and his mother Elena (Peter Dager and Mariana Trevino, respectively)and Cahill’s former caddy Mitts (the interminably irritated, cynical Marc Maron; it’s exactly what you’d expect) in the first few episodes (a cast that expands at the end of episode three, and later introduces Timothy Olyphant as Pryce’s old nemesis). All of the lead performances are solid – but where Stick starts to break down is when it tries to piece these characters together, and leans on a couple tired tropes to try and make its familiar narratives more compelling.

The biggest issue is how tragedy-driven every character is; there are absent fathers, kids who die with cancer, and a dead wife, all alluded to in the first hour of the series. Not only is it repetitive, but it ends up being incredibly reductive; there are all these little narrative veins Stick teases, like whether Cahill has any idea what he’s doing with Santi, or Elena’s intentions in letting her son play golf again (a game he quit at 14 years old), that would make the series more challenging, more complex – and potentially more rewarding, especially as a rag-tag story of underdogs healing together through sport, which is so obviously what Stick wants to be at the end of the day.

But rather than engage with its more dissonant notes, to challenge itself with more dynamic conflicts or present Cahill as anything but equally aloof and resilient, Stick‘s first three episodes lean away from these ideas and towards something that’s certainly more endearing superficially, but severely limits the show’s ability to try and go for big, evocative moments of emotion or tension. Everything’s just a bit too easy and simplified for Cahill and his cohorts, the conflicts dissipating into dust almost the moment they are pushed to the forefront – and while it doesn’t entirely derail the series and make it unwatchable, makes it feel a lot more inflexible and two-dimensional than its premise suggests it would be.

Ultimately, there isn’t anything new Stick has to offer audiences; it wanders from narrative to narrative, ploying for emotive moments like Cahill watching an old anniversary video of him and his ex, or Elena delivering a monologue that makes it painfully clear the story of surrogate fathers and sons lying at the heart of this series. And while there’s nothing wrong with that – Stick is a perfectly watchable series, one effusing with beautifully shot landscapes, though there are way too many shots of one center-of-frame character talking off screen to another character (the pilot episode is particularly egregious of this, and feels like everyone was shot on an empty set) – it is disappointing to see a series that almost gets it, that has all of the pieces, in how it forms its basic ideas and depicts the sport at the heart of its series, but isn’t really able to put them together into something uniquely compelling, or particularly memorable.

Grade: C