- Network: Apple TV
- Series Premiere Date: Jun 4, 2025
Critic Reviews
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This golfing comedy is just about on par — but it could have taken a bigger swing and move beyond the usual sporting stereotypes. Still, Owen Wilson shines.
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It’s all perfectly watchable but, like following an actual golf tournament on TV, if you nod off during the second round only waking up for the closing holes, you won’t have missed too much. As sports comedies go, Stick is pretty much par for the course.
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The series is essentially a 10-episode sports movie, with all the hooks, shanks and holes that come with the territory, so the outright surprises are few. But it’s the kind of thing one will like, if one has any affection for Mr. Wilson’s brand of arrested adolescence.
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Stretching clichés so thin that its comedy by and large vanishes, thereby neutering charming turns from Owen Wilson and Mark Maron, this slog is like a more heartfelt Happy Gilmore if it ran as long as Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
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Warmhearted, inoffensive TV has its place, and there’s plenty audiences might appreciate about “Stick” despite some predictable beats; stories about healing can bridge a lot of thematic incoherence. But for a show that talks a fair bit about when to take big swings — and when not to — “Stick” is disappointingly timid.
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The season may be a serviceable substitute until “Ted Lasso” returns, but there’s no mistaking this amateur imitation for its veteran inspiration.
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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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A handful of chuckles over 10 episodes isn't enough to put Stick on the comedy leaderboard, even in the "upbeat white guy" division.
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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.
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The elements of the show that do start to gel only make the trauma-plot framework more annoying. Every time Stick starts to roll ahead into some momentum for the future, the story has to boomerang around into a reminder of where they’ve all been. Each step forward comes with two steps back.
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Its heart is firmly in the right place, but it leaks treacle and cliché all over the screen. Worse still, you can watch several of the first season’s 10 episodes without laughing once. “Stick” inspires impassivity, not a good quality for a comedy or really, any other kind of television.