A scene from the first season of StickThe Apple TV + comedies series takes place in the golf world, continues to stay in my train. At the end of the seventh episode, the former character of PGA Tour – Pro Tour – Pro is at a crossroads with Santi (Peter Dager), the protégé he tried to shape the next big star of sport. Santi said to the character of Wilson, Pryce, whom he no longer wants to play in amateur tournaments. What is aims then? Santi says: “I’m talking about the show.”
As in the PGA Tour. Santi wants to compete with the best players in the world. And so, in the ninth episode of the series, “Showtime”, the former pro and the advanced amateur find a way to bring it into a professional tournament. There is only one problem with all this scenario: I am not sure that anyone in the history of golf called the PGA Tour like “The Show”. Major League Baseball is commonly called “The Show”, and the nickname is so well established that The show is even the name of the most popular baseball video game. But, as a person who has attended and covered many professional golf tournaments, who play golfy almost every week, and who has asked the question to several golf media friends, I cannot say at any time in the long history of the PGA tour was never a nickname that all group used to describe the best golf tower. Even within the limits of a fictitious television program, this is certainly not that one of the best amateur players in the world would describe the circuit he would like to join.
This improbability illustrates the main problem with Stickwhich was presented in June to warm to positive criticisms. The series Several things that are happening: there is Wilson to play a role with a ton of heart, avenging the demons of golf and paternity as he helps Santi to reconnect with the game after the manipulator of the young player ruined him for him. There is a kind of fun friend routine, between the former Caddie de Pryce, “Mitts” (Marc Maron, back from the Podcasting for his first television role in a little), and Santa’s mother, Elena (Mariana Treviño). He has a textured teenage romance between Santi and his shopping cart / friend / connection, Zero (Lilli Kay).
This is why it is disappointing that Stick Fails one of the most important tests that any spectacle or film on sport must pass: it must dramatize the sport enough to make it convincing for everyone, but without building so much basic details that it seems inexpensive for people who follow sport closely. This does not mean in any case that a sports show must be realistic To be good, something that Apple TV + has already learned with its successful series Ted LassoA resolutely impossible story of an American university football coach taking his talents from English football. The art of sport just needs to do enough to live in the world it lives in – and that’s where StickNegligence reduces which would otherwise be a much better spectacle.
Showrunner Jason Keller Do not dwell on the nuts and golf bolts, because most people have common sense (which I miss) so as not to be interested in the finest points of the corner game and the late. Some of us Can have benefited from a detailed discussion on the reasons why Santi was winning his midirons or fighting to control his low point, but if you are one of the almost 100% of humans who do not care much about golf, your eyes are repercussions. You immediately connect to the Barracuda championship on Golf Channel.
The show therefore takes on fun and even ambitious liberties. Pryce and Mitts direct a recurring stampede with mittens of bar bars in bets that Pryce will not make a putt in a drink to drink. Santi, by showing his skills, hits a shot of 250 yards which takes place a tiny sign, a level of control that even Tiger Woods to his peak could not gather with any consistency. Stick Also imagine a much more inclusive world of high -level golf that there are really. Zero, a server of restaurants that becomes the caddy of Santi, uses them and she / her pronouns and has extensive conversations with Santi on gender and sexuality. No one says anything to mean or move to exclude Zero from sport. I fear that the reception will be very different in the high level golf course, which flows with cultural conservatism. (The PGA Tour no longer even publishes the assessments of the month of the pride of the tokens, and the only non -critical player on the PGA Tour or the LPGA Tour in recent years has faced a creeping transphobia and was prohibited from the competition.)
It’s great that Stick Don’t let it slow down. The low description that the series is Ted Lasso Because golf is not all the harm. Where the two show diverges in the more fundamental presentation of sports which serve as respective decorations. Ted Lasso is a hyperdetaled love letter to English football (fine, football), intended to look exactly like a show around a small outdog club would look: the installations are a little more cute. Local advertising is the link of the group of club supporters. Football references are not too technical, but they have meat behind them, because the whole premise of the show is that an American Redneck must learn more about football. The exploration by the show of the shabby property and investors was almost too much on the nose for certain fans.
Stick It makes too many mistakes in this area for the spectacle to reach its potential. References to “The Show”, a nickname that does not exist in golf, is only an example in a risk of water full of them. In a first episode, Pryce warns Santi not to play too aggressively with her approach shooting on a single hole because the green is kept by a difficult bunker known by the inhabitants like “The Copacabana”, which Pryce warns seems to be a good thing but no. It’s a little attempt neat by Stick Lean about a real part of golf culture – that many courses have intimidating design features that take their own tradition and can be frightening for players who have never seen them before. (The United States Open has been played on a course with a bunker called “Big Mouth”.) But when Santi actually hits this bunker, we see that this sand trap should not be so intimidating. It does not require that the player strikes on a high lip, and there are tons of green between the sand and the hole. A player like Santi would peer from this patch of varified dirt almost every time.
The show tries to channel more parts of sport culture in a way that does not quite click. During an amateur tournament, Santi plays, there are two guys who give off a certain sporting energy of bar stools and shout “potatoes” after a player hit his shot. Certain PGA Tour events are crawling with this type of guy, but indescribable amateur tournaments are certainly not. In addition, the cries of the only guy on the potatoes just comes a beat too late to look like a real golf bozo shouted. “I hate golf brothers,” said Elena in response. Indeed, but they would not be there. The show is also struggling several times with the pronunciation of a famous name of golf course (Muirfield is “Meer-Champ”, not “Morry-Field”) and disperses a bunch of phrase turns which are just far enough for a real golf fan remark. In StickA flea shot is “made” rather than “hit” or even “played”, as someone would say in real life. A “PGA tournament” is referenced, when the character clearly talks about the PGA TourA distinct leading body. (Most of the country makes this mistake, but elite golfers sucking on a career in sport do not do so.) Santi refers to an event like “the first tour I have ever seen”, rather than the first tournament. These are all tiny things, but there is SO a lot From them, and, as Arnold Palmer said – and the character of Wilson reminds us several times – Golf is a game of thumbs.
The problem with Stick Is it not that Santi hits unrealistic shots or that the sound effect of his club striking the ball is a bit marked. HAPPY Gilmore is one of the most pleasant sporting films ever made, and the golf it represents is intentionally ridiculous. (Watch it.) But this film nailed the environment around The golf course, which allowed Adam Sandler to successfully play a chaos agent among a visit to the hetero men. (Remember when the stifling pros send him to the “Ninth Green at 9” to be soaked by the sprinklers?) Stickon the other hand, Use golf as a vehicle to move along the points of the intrigue on growth, sorrow and parenting, but the volume of avoidable errors, that makes, raises the right question of why it was necessary to be a golf show in the first place. Sometimes it is only in a way; The fourth episode of the series, one of its best, does not even approach a golf course, and it is best for that.
Non-golfers, there can still be something here for you. If I didn’t really like golf and I care about its ins and outs, I would have liked Stick more. Aside from the botched references to the sporting tapestry, the spectacle builds a strong relationship on the screen between the character of Wilson and his young charge, who fill a vacuum left on one side by an absent father and on the other by the death of a child. And, to be fair, the idiot that the whole brings together in episode 8 to bring Santi into a PGA Tour event is a riot. Stick Takes large swings, and enough connect to do something decent. The show just lacks too much taps to really be great.
