Golfers Say Owen Wilson’s Apple TV+ Series ‘Stick’ Is Sub-Par

Ted Lasso makes it look easy, but it is extraordinarily hard to make a really good TV show that is ostensibly about sports. Hell, it’s challenging enough just to make a really good TV show — satisfying the obsessive fandom that comes with sports only complicates the mission further. Wanna up the difficulty level to 11? Pick golf as the sport you’re going to dramatize — or in this case, cometize (comedtize?).

For (at least) a decade-and-a-half, Caddyshack (1980) was the definitive golf comedy, even though the golf parts are its worst parts. Sixteen years later, within six months of one-another, a pair of golf films came for that crown: Tin Cup, a rom-com starring the athletic Kevin Costner, and Happy Gilmore, a comedy-comedy starring the athletic-enough-for-backlot-basketball Adam Sandler. It is reasonable to rank those three golf comedies in any order you’d like; no matter how you slice it, Stick will not shake the standings up.

With some exceptions, the actual golf in Stick is OK. Pryce “Stick” Cahill (Owen Wilson) is a washed-up, messed-up, has-been pro golfer, a plot that presents a problem: Wilson is not a golfer. Or rather, he was not a golfer. Wilson must have been a quick study — his golf swing looks good on Jason Keller’s camera. (The takes that make the edit do, at least.) You know whose swing looks great on Stick? The show’s teenage golf prodigy, Santiago Wheeler, played by Peter Dager, another newcomer to the game. Credit the series’ golf consultant Nathan Leonhardt for bringing both of them up to speed. (And the doubles still in some scenes, for sure.)

Stick got a lot of it right, so where did it go wrong?

Though the swings look good, the actual golf isn’t quite right. For starters, Pryce and Santi first meet over a bet that the kid can’t hit an iron within five feet of a 200-yard marker. Santi hits the marker itself. Double or nothing: the 250 marker. Bangs that one too, no problem. Santi then calls his next shot — a shed 320 yards away — bang. All this, by the way, with crappy clubs and crappier range balls.

And then there’s the extended mid-round break Santi took to throw a tantrum (rightly or wrongly). In the real world, it would have resulted in a missing persons report let alone a tournament disqualification. (The tantrum/break was followed by an incredible final nine holes for Santi to go from +6 to -2.) There are way too many hole-outs from way too far away. Yes, I know, it’s for dramatic effect, and yes, I know, I was just praising Tin Cup, which ends on the most epic hole-out in golf history, like five sentences ago. But it’s too much.

Perhaps the most egregious golf-continuity error thus far is from Santi’s walk-off pitching wedge on 18. Santi sinks the game winner from probably 100 yards out to go from -1 to -2, but a bomber like Wheeler, now playing at a record pace, would almost never have an approach shot from that distance for birdie. The shot only makes sense as an eagle, which means he’d be -3. But even that doesn’t work, because when Santi is on the tee box — with driver, mind you — it looks like 18 is a par 3. Let’s be generous and say it’s a very short par 4: Santi’s drive would have cleared the clubhouse, let alone ended up a football field out. He crushes driver for what we’re estimating to to be a net 70 yards, maybe. My best guess is that they shot themselves in the foot with an establishing shot for Santi’s tee…shot.

Perhaps I’m nitpicking. That’s what golfers do — even the bad ones, like me. Golf is the most precise sport we have; simulating the game is a high bar to hurdle. And unlike most sports that have a relatively short window of viability, golfers golf until they die, meaning that many of the people judging new Stick episodes on a Friday have a Saturday morning tee time. The personal investment in most other sports simply cannot compare to golf.

It is also unfair to compare Stick to Ted Lasso. (It’s unfair to compare any comedy to Ted Lasso.) Yes, they’re both feel-good Apple TV+ comedies set in the world of sports — but that is where their similarities end. But if I was to compare the two, I’d say that Stick missed the part where you’re supposed to have likable characters. Sure, Pryce is, and Marc Maron’s sourpuss caddie Mitts is as well — and both of the lead (adult) actors perform very well here.

But that’s pretty much where it ends for the main cast. Santi’s a moody teen, and though I’m sure will come around on his goodhearted mom, it’s really hard to root for a character who insists the down-on-his-luck Cahill pay her $100,000 for the privilege of coaching her (moody) kid. To borrow an analogy from another ball-hitting sport, we’re still in early innings here, and I’m reserving final judgment on Elena (Mariana Treviño).

And then there’s Zero.

For a contingent of viewers, Stick primarily went wrong with the introduction of the Zero character, played by Lilli Kay (Your Honor). Zero, a former bartender at a clubhouse restaurant joins the gang in episode three, set up as Santi’s romantic interest. Coincidentally (probably), Apple TV+ releases the first three episodes of a show at once as a means to hook a viewer; Zero was a relatively tangential character at the time Stick premiered.

But in episode four, she (Zero says her pronouns are “she/they,” leading to old-white-man confusion for Pryce and Mitts) becomes Santi’s caddy; she later labels themself a “genderqueer anticapitalist post-colonial feminist.” (Kay, the actor, identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.)

Golf is (very generally) still an old white man’s game, which is exactly why the Zero (born Christina Marie Duffy, we learn) character is such a natural antagonist in that world. It could certainly be argued that golfers might disproportionately be anti-woke, and thus are misaligned with Zero’s values. It could also be argued that what is grating to viewers is Zero’s personality. The character has thus far proven to be both good to and good for Santi, but Zero has not won-over the internet.

Take the latest post about the series in the r/golf community, titled “I wanted to believe you were wrong about Stick.”

“But you were right. It is a very bad show,” Redditor PrettyFlyGuy05 writes. “Other than Owen Wilson, all of the characters are incredibly unlikable, there are so many little details that are unrealistic, and the whole thing feels rushed.”

Though PrettyFlyGuy05 doesn’t mention Zero by name, most of the commenters sure did.

The most up-voted comment on the post: “It’s not the greatest show in the world but I was casually enjoying … that is until the fucking Zero character started taking over the show,” naked_short wrote. “She was mild enough in ep 3 and hoped she had a one episode arc. Nope, back in ep 4 and now with more talking. Now she’s the fucking caddy.”

The Hollywood Reporter got in touch with PrettyFlyGuy05, a 27-year-old government worker from Florida named Axton B. He plays to an 18 handicap, by the way.

Axton agreed with the commenters’ general assessment of Zero. The character, he told THR, “took a unremarkable show and made it much less fun to watch.”

Another Reddit r/golf user who goes by 52488 commented, “I can’t tell if the point of her character is to try to get people to appreciate and understand her performative wokeness point of view or absolutely despise it.”

It is the thoughtful comments that get you.

Wait until the group hears that Kay’s dad is a director and executive producer on Yellowstone, where Kay played series regular Clara Brewer; Kay’s stepmom is Yellowstone actress Piper Perabo.

Overall, Axton estimated for us that about 70-80 percent of those who commented on his post “would agree that Stick is at the very best a mediocre show,” and that “most of those would go on to say that they dislike the show.”

“Those that defend the show wouldn’t even say that they are wild about it, but enjoy it more casually because there aren’t any other shows made specifically for golfers at the moment,” he added.

Axton, who plays to an 18 handicap (that’s not good, but better than me!), was also irked by the golf parts.

“In one scene where they are practicing on a simulator, you can see that there is an avatar that is copying the golfers movements,” he said. “As someone with a lot of experience with simulators, I have never seen that in real life.”

Nor has he ever heard an instructor teach a student to hit a draw shot by opening the club face up, as Pryce tells Santi. “That’s how you hit a fade, not a draw,” Axton said.

The sentiment ain’t much different on Twitter — we checked.

It is only fair to point out that social media can be a bit of a self-selecting sample when it comes to voicing opinions, and often, the loudest voices in the room are expressing negativity. At launch, Stick was “Certified Fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, a badge it’s since lost. As of this writing, Stick has a 79 percent rating among critics, 70 percent among top critics and a 59 percent from the audience.

Count THR critic Angie Han among those who found it to be fresh. In her review, Han wrote that Stick could be Apple’s “next big crowd pleaser.” (Perhaps Han doesn’t hang out much on r/golf.)

“Stick really shines as a hangout comedy, with a lively but easy chemistry that can make ten half-hours — and, for that matter, hundreds of miles of open road — fly by in the blink of an eye,” Han wrote, adding that Stick is “only sometimes a laugh-out-loud show, but it’s very consistently a smile-ear-to-ear show.”

But even for Han, the Zero character does not work (through “no fault of the appealingly tart Kay,” she writes).

“Zero, with their fluid pronouns and haughtily declared stances against meat and capitalism, never totally stops feeling like a Gen Z caricature upon which Gen Xers like Pryce and Mitts can project their ‘kids today’ grievances,” she wrote.