I really like Ted Lasso and I really like golf, so I was always going to love the new Apple TV comedy featuring Owen Wilson, Stick. Wasn’t I?
Alas not, and by a long stretch. It is a golfified riff on the smash hit football show that, if you haven’t seen it, features an American soccer coach managing an English football team, and all the scrutiny and stereotypes you would imagine attached to it.
My overarching emotion is ‘Why?’, closely followed by ‘What?’ Why has someone made Stick?
Ted Lasso was myriad things all at once. There was hope for the hopeless. It taught us values, it taught us that no matter how serious or sad life gets, it can still be enjoyed. It showed us not to judge a book by its cover.
It flipped stereotypes. It was a parody and a parable all at once. It was also close enough to some kind of reality to be relatable and believable.
Stick is just weird and includes Owen Wilson, who appears to be playing himself again in the form of Pryce Cahill. The premise is that an over-the-hill ex-golfer who has no job sets out to coach a young player when his wife has had enough of him.
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Stick: Owen Wilson stars in new golf show comparable to Ted Lasso
This version of himself has a desperately sad back story, but this is only loosely alluded to in the early episodes and hard to make sense of, so we are left expecting to root for a feckless anti-hero who seems hellbent on spending all his money as quickly as possible, whilst irritating everyone he encounters.
His partner in crime is so reminiscent of the stooges you’d find in early 2000s porn that I had to clear my search history after watching.
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The golf scenes are what they always are in golf dramatisation – weird, kitsch, and hard to watch – much like golf itself then, you might say.
But the narrative of a player recovering from last place to win a tournament is something not even LIV Golf can contrive. The on-course advice from Wilson, a.k.a Stick, is something worthy of a Forebrothers meme. (Take a look here if you haven’t seen them, either)
So that leaves the ‘What’. Four episodes in, and I am unclear what I am watching. A talented youngster, who had a mean dad is now being pseudo-fostered by a yet-to-be-realised kindred spirit. All the while, he is wrestling with the usual teenage issues, like dating someone with multiple pronouns.
At the same time, his peculiarly Hispanic mum falls in love (presumably) with Ben Dover in a campervan, and all because Owen Wilson thought it was a good idea.
No thanks.
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Have you seen Stick on Apple TV? What have you made of it? Do you like it, or is it as bad as Tom suggests? Tell us on X!
