P ryce Cahill (Owen Wilson) isn’t worried about his midlife crisis. “Moses had a crisis! Churchill had a crisis! Charlie Sheen had a crisis!” We’re not worrying, either: Pryce has been living fairly happily through a midlife crisis for as long as we’ve known him, which is for the one previous season of the superficially inessential yet sneakily deeply emotional golf comedy Stick.
Stick is the sort of chummy hangout show you need in your carefully curated weekly culture roster, a half-hour indulgence that’s like twisting open a cold one and sinking into a couch. It washes all those prestige dramas and dark documentaries down nicely.
We first met Pryce as a retired golfer, once a scintillatingly talented legend of the game who carelessly threw his potential away. In his has-been 50s he was childless and divorced, bumming around selling golf equipment and coaching no-hopers, when he stumbled on 17-year-old Santiago Wheeler (Peter Dager) pinging it 300 yards on a crappy Indiana driving range, and the bug bit all over again. Pryce convinced Santi to take golf seriously and, with Pryce as his mentor, the lad ended season one as the hottest young amateur on the PGA tour.
Around Pryce and Santi is a found family led by Santi’s mother Elena (Mariana Treviño), who is smart and resourceful but unprepared for the hoopla of top-level sport. The obvious route for the show to go down would have been for her to be Pryce’s new love interest, but instead she’s in a relationship with his best pal and former caddie Mitts (Marc Maron, playing exactly to type as a bristly cynic with the softest heart). Santi is dating Zero (Lilli Kay), a gender-fluid social media expert the gang picked up on the road, and who has become Santi’s caddie, more for their kind wisdom than their golfing insight.
They’re good people we enjoy spending time with, and Stick enjoys the easy life as much as it can. Wouldn’t it be great, it says, to be out there on the course, hitting balls in the sunshine? Wouldn’t it be great if those balls went straight down the middle, so much so that you could play in tournaments, lining up against Wyndham Clark, Max Homa and Collin Morikawa (all of whom popped up as themselves in season one)? As Santi lives the dream to a retro soundtrack of the Who, the Stones, Faces and Three Dog Night, the show says: wouldn’t it be great to be young again?
But when it turned out that Santi had given up golf as a boy when his dad left home, Stick became a thoughtful musing on fathers and sons that turned serious when we learned that Pryce was not always childless – his son, Jett, died aged four, and all Pryce’s mismanagement of his own life and career is coloured by the loss. Ask a Stick fan about the dream sequence that imagined Jett at various ages, becoming a young man in an alternative world where Pryce and Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) are still happily married, and as their eyes cloud over you’ll know that Stick is not afraid to let a warm, thick tear plop into its beer.
If season one was about Pryce getting the chance to make all the parenting mistakes he missed out on making before, now the challenge for him is to let Santi make mistakes of his own. He’s no longer a child and, as the giant paychecks and glamorous trappings of elite golf prove too hard to resist, he’s not minded to take Pryce’s paternal advice by waiting, getting a college degree then hitting the circuit when he’s fully mature. As Pryce steps back and leaves Elena and Zero to look after their boy, the old group splits.
Pryce is thus free to embrace his midlife crisis fully, which he does by vowing to revive his playing career, with the goal of winning the US Open at the age of 55. He and Mitts get back on the road, this time in the company of Clark, a smoothly untrustworthy golfer turned salesman who is just about the most Timothy Olyphant role Timothy Olyphant has ever played.
With Olyphant, Maron and Wilson all in their groove, Stick becomes a pure dopamine hit once more, and its bittersweet pondering on paths not taken, regrets that can’t be erased and youth that evaporated in an eye-blink is a key part of its sleepy charm. When the middle of the season adds Rhea Seehorn , no less, as Amanda, a demon swing coach who just happens to be Pryce’s great lost love – it takes a while for this to be explicit, but Wilson and Seehorn make it beautifully obvious within seconds – Stick really is thoroughly spoiling us. Treat yourself.
