The wellness golf comedy is stuck on a trauma

The new Apple TV + sports show Stick feels good. It feels good, so hard, with efforts and with focus. StickThe good feeling is not only superficial either. It lives with structural, aesthetic, performative and almost molecular level. It is a show on the golf course and the incredible good feeling that accompanies the bombing of this ball through the county line or tapping it perfectly through green. Its colors are saturated and bright, and it does good to look at these immaculate golf shirts against the green grass. He features Owen Wilson, an actor whose presence on the screen shouts “Do we not feel well?” I am sure I am ”, even when the character he plays clearly puts himself. It is a sporting show. The victory will be torn from the jaws of the defeat. The games will be won and lost, but what will be really important is to play with the heart. And like so many television series on feeling good, Stick Start from an ubiquitous first odious principle: everyone must start by feeling very, very bad.

Television and culture are more broadly years in an apparently unshakable dependence on trauma intrigue, and its presence has gone from notable, to omnipresent, to unravel. Each character has a past, and this past probably understands trauma. Each trauma is in an arithmetic relationship with the events of the show of the present. A deceased parent, more time, less adaptation, multiplied by the number of direct parallels with the current circumstances of the character, is equal to history. He has so much weight, so much of power, because it is more true: people experience terrible things, and these experiences often help to explain who they become.

This is also precisely what makes programs like Stick So frustrating. The first episode fully describes the premise. Owen Wilson, as a Cahill Pryce “Stick”, is a former divorced and washed golf professional who has exploded her career with a collapse of all-chronometer in the middle of a tournament and is now remarkably (but depressing!) For golf clubs in the moon. His ex-wife, Amber-Linn, played by Judy Greer, needed him on the way he remained stuck in a sub-perform limbo. His friend Mitts (Marc Maron) helps him to shake up the money from the barflies without mistrust. Things are bad! Until he performs on Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager), a 17 -year -old golf prodigy who tears the practice with both talents and an ill -hidden anger. Stick sees a future for Santi. So he gets up, convinces Santi, it’s time to hit the road, and with Mitts and Santi’s mother, Elena (Mariana Treviño), they left for a motorhome so that Santi qualified for the big tournament.

Ah, but of course, Stick Cahill cannot just be a pro golf that has exploded his career and now tries to do good, and Santi cannot just be a 17 -year -old with impulsiveness problems. No, no – Stick needs to play a game from Why They are as they are. Golf is a game played between your ears, common truism Stick Attributes to Arnold Palmer, and before Stick and Santi can heal their games, they will have to cure themselves. Quickly, Stick reveals that Santi was abandoned by his father, who taught him to be a golf wizard, knew his confidence by criticizing him perpetually and then disappeared. It is not surprising that Santi swings with a feeling of revenge, and Stick Be careful to make sure. It is not surprising. There is no mystery. There is no tacit or unexplored emotional complexity. The calculation is virgin, and it takes place throughout the season like a Rubik cube is resolved, block by block, until everything corresponds perfectly.

More blatant, however, this is the path Stick Presents the key to unlocking Cahill Énui’s stick. A single man in possession of a quarantine crisis must have the lack of a traumatic background, and Stick is ready – eager – to be provided. The scene arrives at the end of the first episode, just as Stick finally decided to kiss this new chapter in his life and hit the road with Santi. He makes the improbable decision to insert a DVD that looks like a mounting facts of the family: Stick and Amber-Linn laughing while they move into their new house, being pretty honeymoon. And then she is pregnant, then all their family videos involve a young son who has not been seen or spoken today. Obviously, the sorrow to lose it led everything that followed, including collapse and divorce and the sad pro-shop bite. The problem for the stick does not concern the future; He has already found Santi, understood how to get out of his money hole and planned to get on the road. This is a sporting show with bright colors and an optimistic sequence of opening credits with Owen Wilson; this goes feel good. The problem is, and has always been and will always be, on the past.

Just because it’s true Stick ends up starting to settle a little. The intrigue of Santi allows its past to arrive in the present in history, and once the gang adds Lilli Kay like Zero, a former bartender who becomes the love interest of Santi and the Golf Caddy, the whole starts to relax in the Hangout of Bill Lawrence style, it is obviously sucked in. (Stick is such a blatant Ted Lasso To tear down that it is honestly difficult to believe that Brett Goldstein does not hide somewhere on the touch.) He even manages to achieve the feat of making a booming complaining of Zero She / The Pronouns in a semi-chanminal runner, a challenge that no television program should even consider if she does not have an interpreter with the capacity of Marc Maron for aggregate compassion.

But the elements of the spectacle that start to gel only make the frame of traumato-intrigue more boring. Each time Stick Begins to move forward in a certain momentum for the future, history must boomerang in a reminder where they were all. Each step forward is accompanied by two steps back. Each history development is equal to a past event, then sent to a small narrative escape room to discuss their similarities and differences, such as a team consolidation exercise translated into scripted television. Or as a conference on the business manager where everything must be inexplicably concerning golf – but perhaps this comparison is redundant.