AppleTV+ Thinks You Love ‘Ted Lasso,’ So Meet Owen Wilson’s ‘Ted Golfo’

In times past, the multicam sitcom was a format that gave its stars a lot to like. Of course, there was the pleasure of getting instant from a studio audience, which could be crucial for surviving a long shooting day. But there was also the fact that it was a shooting day, singular. While cast and crew would rehearse and block an episode one or more days during the week, those days could be short, letting stars roll in at a reasonable hour and maybe even leave in time to pick up their kids from school. A single-camera sitcom is tougher: The same scene has to be shot many more times to get different coverage angles, and when you’re chasing the light outdoors, your call time might be punishingly early. All that might be true for Stick, too, but considering it’s a sports comedy, stars Owen Wilson and Marc Maron sure aren’t breaking a sweat.

The show, which premieres its first three episodes on AppleTV+ June 4th, stars Wilson as Pryce Cahill. Though he was once a spectacularly successful pro golfer, we meet him at a much less glamorous point in his life: He’s routinely begging for advances on his commissions selling clubs, driving a sports car covered in Bondo and dodging his ex-wife Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) and her growing impatience that he clean all his crap out of their formerly shared home so that they can sell it and finalize their divorce. 

He’s in the middle of one of his other gigs — coaching an old lady — when he happens to see Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager) at the driving range slicing balls with unworldly power, distance and accuracy. After a golf course manager chases Santi, who isn’t a member, back to his job at a nearby supermarket, Pryce tracks Santi down and makes him an offer: Pryce will coach him, take him on the road to compete in amateur tournaments around the country, and try to launch him into a pro career. (Why is he doing all this? A moment toward the end of the premiere, when Amber-Linn sadly tells Pryce, “It won’t bring him back,” sends us into a DVD of highlights from the Cahills’ marriage, including the birth and early years of a towheaded son we previously haven’t seen or heard tell of, so: that’s a big part of it.) 

Once he’s convinced Santi’s very protective mother Elena (Maria Treviño) and Pryce’s old caddy Mitts (Maron), they all hit the road in Mitts’ RV. It’s a TV debut for creator Jason Keller, whose screenplay credits include Machine Gun Preacher and Ford Vs. Ferrari.

I understand that no one comes to either an Owen Wilson or a Marc Maron performance expecting to see them disappear into their roles. Here, they’re playing a couple of middle-aged guys who live in Fort Wayne, Indiana; we don’t need them to undergo a Penguin-esque physical transformation. But both Maron and Wilson are wearing their characters as loosely as an actor can, to the point where they might as well have had their scripts in their hands in all their scenes. Neither of them was apparently even willing to cut their hair. They’re both so low-effort that I almost ire it. Committing that little would be fine in a heavily jokey sitcom, but since this is basically Ted Golfo, both Pryce and Mitts come to us with trauma — the loss of treasured loved ones — that we have to watch them work through. Sorry if this blows your mind, but the Owen Wilson character has responded by burying his pain in chill cheerfulness, and the Marc Maron character has become a determined curmudgeon. Their performances are so unsurprising that I have to assume they were either written with both in mind, or rewritten once they were attached.

Official press materials tell us Stick “is a heartfelt, feel-good sports comedy about a found family and their relationships set within the world of golf as it has never been shown before.” The rest of said “found family” do what they can to create suspense. Santi has already been a huge success on the amateur tournament circuit, coached by his father, but when he started to feel that too much of his father’s approval rested on his game, he quit, and his father left the family. Naturally, Elena is wary about Pryce and the possibility of Santi entering into a relationship with another golf dad type who might push Santi too hard or let him down. On the road, they meet Zero, she/they (Lilli Kay), a recently unemployed country club bartender who gets swept up in their traveling caravan; Zero and Santi are both young and inexperienced in romantic relationships, which leads to plenty of impetuous fights and hurt feelings on both sides. 

Zero notes, at one point, that it may not be healthy for Santi to have this whole entourage catering to him for the advancement of his career, but that notion is swiftly slapped down: the directive for the show seems to be to keep bad vibes to a minimum. Even what is inarguably Santi’s most emotionally devastating plotline is dispensed with well before the end of the episode it arises in.

Clark Ross (Timothy Olyphant) — an old rival of Pryce’s now comfortably retired into running a golf academy, endorsing an insurance company in golf-themed TV commercials and glad-handing at his namesake steak house — is about as villainous as anyone is ever allowed to be on this show. We hear tell of Clark having said something awful to Pryce before a tournament that made Pryce punch him in the face before having the on-course meltdown that both made Pryce a viral sensation and ended his golf career, but we never actually find out what Clark said, leaving the door open for an enemies-to-friends redemption arc the audience will accept since his earlier shit-talk can’t prejudice us. 

I never needed the frictionless pleasantness of an AppleTV+ sitcom to be wed with the stoner pleasantness of Owen Wilson, but here it is anyway: Stick isn’t bad, it’s just fine, and forgettable. If Wilson and Maron are content to spend a whole season acting like they’re marking a rehearsal, I’m content for them both to get some easy money out of it. But if the show had seemed a bit less easy, it might have been more interesting.