Owen Wilson Stars in Endearing Apple TV+ Golf Dramedy

Stick, Apple TV+’s new golf comedy starring Owen Wilson, does not come with the tagline “For fans of Shrinking and Ted Lasso.” It doesn’t need to: Between the cuddly yet poignant mood, the found-family ensemble, the focus on flawed but generally non-toxic male role models and the overall Dad TV vibe, there’s no mistaking who its target audience is meant to be.

But familiarity isn’t necessarily a drawback when it comes to comfort viewing, and certainly not for a rookie that can play the game nearly as well as the old pros. While not, at this point, quite as ambitious as its actual tagline (“Take a big swing”) might suggest, its assured tone, fat-free storytelling and, most especially, winning cast could give Stick everything it needs to develop into the platform’s next big crowd-pleaser.

As mandated by formula, Jason Keller’s series centers on a protagonist whose seemingly chipper exterior guards a secretly broken heart. This time, it’s Pryce “Stick” Cahill (Wilson), a former pro whose once-brilliant career imploded after a very public meltdown. By the time we meet him in the Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton-directed pilot, 16 years later, he’s capitalizing on his tarnished reputation to shill overpriced golf equipment to rank amateurs and occasionally hustle drunk locals with his erstwhile caddy, Mitts (Marc Maron). Not that the money’s going to be enough to keep him in his home once his unwanted divorce from Amber-Linn (Judy Greer) finally goes through.

But hope arrives in the unexpected form of Santi (Peter Dager), a 17-year-old blessed with a raw talent that gets Pryce dreaming about “getting in on the ground floor of the next Tiger Woods.” For reasons both obviously cynical and devastatingly personal, Pryce insists on taking the kid under his wing. For reasons that may or may not have to do with a lifetime of daddy issues, Santi — with the wary blessing of his mother, Elena (Mariana Treviño) — agrees. So kicks off a whirlwind tour of qualifying matches, with Pryce and Santi and Elena and eventually Santi’s love interest Zero (Lilli Kay) piling into Mitts’ RV with an eye toward getting Santi into the U.S. Amateur.

As a sports story, Stick is perhaps too timid. Keller is deft with translations of golf lingo for novice audiences, and generous with effusive monologues about the characters’ love of the sport. He is less successful at translating what makes golf special — what separates it from any other sport or makes it uniquely qualified to, as Pryce gushes, “unlock the mysteries of the universe if you’re open to it.” Rather than teach us to admire the unique brand of athleticism golf requires, the show relies, to the end, on zippy camera movements and actor reactions to convey whether Santi’s swings are meant to be impressive or disastrous. The green mainly just serves as a physical stage on which to play out internal emotional conflicts, and even by the standards of what one commentator explicitly describes as a “Cinderella story,” Santi’s ascendance through the ranks seems implausibly tidy, the occasional roadblocks so predictable we can see them coming from miles (or rather, episodes) away.

But it’s a testament to what this series does well that it’s tough to mind too much. 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. Keller resists going too quirky with his characters, locating humor instead in the sometimes prickly, often playful exchanges between them, and pathos in their genuine care and concern for one another. The result is only sometimes a laugh-out-loud show, but it’s very consistently a smile-ear-to-ear show.

Dager is a real discovery as Santi, confidently navigating the adolescent swings between sullen rebellion and guileless wonder, boyish silliness and brokenhearted fury. And though he can be heart-meltingly sweet with Kay, he’s most open and vulnerable in his scenes with Treviño, who builds as much of her fiercely protective Elena from the hopes and fears she bites back as the ones she projects more openly.

Stick also makes excellent use of Wilson’s familiar persona, introducing him first as a fast-talking charmer before gradually peeling away the protective layers to expose the sadness at its core. He is, as a rival (Timothy Olyphant) sneers and Pryce himself readily admits, “a loser, a degenerate, a fuckup” — but one with enough goodness to him that we can’t help but root for him anyway. Wilson’s slickness is well balanced by Maron, who imbues Mitts with a predictably amusing irascibility but also a more unexpected note of melancholy.

Not all of the cast members are equally well-served. 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 — no fault of the appealingly tart Kay. And I wish far more for Greer than Amber-Linn’s two-dimensionally exasperated wife, even if the actress nearly manages to transcend the cliché by sheer force of her charisma.

But such is the power of Stick that even here, they come off less like characters the series doesn’t care about than ones we just haven’t had a chance to get to know better yet. This gang is just good company, of the sort that makes it easy to forgive its flaws and extend it the benefit of the doubt. It’s hardly revolutionary to point out that likable characters tend to make for likable shows, and nothing Stick is doing on that front is reinventing the wheel. But why would it? As it stands, this might already be the most pleasant trip you’ll take all summer.