Stick S1E2 Review: Grossweiner's Law and Other Things Pryce Says To Stall
A trip almost falls apart before it begins, a check almost gets cashed, and Owen Wilson talks his way out of every room except the one with the actual handcuffs.
The pilot of Stick had to convince us that an ex-pro with a busted marriage and a borrowed RV could become a believable mentor to a teenage prodigy without sliding into Coach Picks A Kid From The Range mush. The second episode has a harder problem. It has to put the trip in motion, then yank it back, then put it in motion again, all without making Pryce Cahill look like a man who has earned anyone’s trust. The hour solves it the way the show is going to solve most of its problems: by letting Owen Wilson talk past the point a normal screenplay would stop him, and by letting the people around him quietly stop listening.
A driving lesson, a job interview, a one-eighty
The cold open is two men in an RV parking lot, and it is doing more structural work than it announces. Pryce is teaching himself to drive the rig he intends to live in for eight weeks. Mitts is in the passenger seat reading off pivot points and cone-strike counts like a man trying to fail an audition. Pryce keeps cutting too sharp, then leaning into the bit, then accusing Mitts of mistaking his actual incompetence for a recruiting tactic. “I genuinely drive like an asshole. Have you seen my car?” That line is the episode’s mission statement. Pryce is not pretending to be a mess to manipulate his oldest friend. He is a mess, and he is also pretending to be a mess, and he cannot quite tell which one is selling the trip.
The chair on the asphalt is the small visual joke that earns the bigger one later. Mitts sinks into it and refuses to get up. Pryce promises that if Mitts watches Santi hit and still says no, he will drop it. Mitts says, “You’ll drop it?” twice, because he knows Pryce, and the show knows we know him too. The morning at the range is the trip’s first dry run. Santi, played as a swaggering seventeen with a pawnshop bag of clubs, gets the Arnold Palmer speech about the six inches between the ears, asks if they can please play golf instead of sitting through a TED talk, and goes out and shoots a clean front nine before tilting on the back. Pryce tells him to lay up for the 71. Santi goes for the corner. The ball never lands. The episode files that swing away and waits.
Wilson plays the chair scene like a man who knows he has lost the negotiation and is going to keep talking until the words wear his friend down. The reverse-shot is Marc Maron’s Mitts in mild physical comfort, which is funnier than any line Pryce produces. The trip is on. The show has not earned that yet, and the show knows it has not earned that yet.
The bento box, the bank, and the unicorns that will not float
The middle act is a relay of small scenes that all do the same job, which is to inventory the people Pryce is about to drag along. He stops at the office of his estranged wife Amber-Linn to sign the closing documents on a house called Raintree, and he flirts in the doorway the way men in romantic comedies flirt when they have stopped paying for the date. She tells him to be professional. He says she looks really good. She says, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.” It plays as warmth in the moment. The episode is going to detonate it inside an hour.
Ben Putman walks in with a bento box and a Blue Zone diet and high cholesterol, and he is so eager to be liked that Pryce’s read on him is automatic. “It’s like you’re sponsored by team janky,” he had said about Santi’s clubs earlier; he runs the same operation on Ben, just under his breath. The ciao gets returned, the grazie gets thrown over a shoulder, and Pryce leaves the office certain that the strange little man with the lunch container has been dispatched. The trick the script pulls is that Pryce is right that Ben is silly and wrong about what silly does for a woman who has stopped wanting to be teased.
Across town, Elena, played by an actor who lands her first big scene at the bank, is sitting across from a financial planner trying to deposit a hundred thousand dollars she barely believes is real. The banker pushes her into a low-risk AIP. She pushes back. She wants the hole in the market. She wants helium. She has inside information from the gig where she fills Mylar unicorns that will not float on three tanks a month, and the banker, with the practiced face of a man who has heard about helium before, tells her she cannot be willy-nilly with this kind of money. Elena reminds herself she does not have a penis. Says it out loud. Tells him that if she did, he would not be putting that face on his face. Reads him the Pretty Woman line. Walks out. It is the funniest scene in the episode and it is the only scene in the episode where someone wins an argument cleanly. The show is paying attention to the women it has been written by men to use as ballast. Good.
Back at the range, the fitting session sets up the actual lesson. Santi crushes drives on the easy course and sprays them everywhere on Eden Prairie, which is the simulator-name the show is going to keep dropping until we accept it as a real place. Pryce calls it Grossweiner’s Law, a piece of homemade pro-tour philosophy attributed to a man whose name Santi correctly guesses is also a porn name. “Pryce Bangin’. That’s my porn name.” The kid is funny. The lesson is real. Be in the swing you are taking, not the swing you took or the swing that comes next. The episode is going to hand that line back to Pryce in a setting where he is not the one who needs to hear it.
The arrest, the prom, and Bento Ben
Then the bench warrant. Thirty-two unpaid parking tickets, a Sergeant Sheffield from Fort Wayne PD with no interest in nicknames, and Pryce in cuffs in the back of a cruiser, dialing Puss Boy from a stranger’s phone. The Mitts voicemail goes unanswered. Elena calls back to talk about her nerves. The officer puts her on speaker. Another arrestee starts screaming in the background. Elena, who has spent the day choosing aggressive over safe, hears the words “police station” and “jail” and hangs up. Pryce delivers the only sane sentence in the scene to a cop who did not ask: “This is why some people think you guys are dicks. I don’t personally. But you can see why some people do when you do something like that.”
The bail-out is the gut-punch the hour has been routing toward. Amber-Linn and Ben walk into the precinct in formal wear. Ben has been honored with a Humanitas award by the Kiwanis Club, an offering the show wraps in just enough cheese to confirm Ben is not the joke he looks like. Pryce asks why they are dressed like it is prom. Amber-Linn tells him she has been dating Ben for six months. “Bento Ben? You’re dating Bento Ben?” The line lands twice. First as the joke Pryce thinks he is making. Then as the recognition that the man he watched leave a room saying ciao has been quietly building a life with the woman whose closing documents he just signed.
What the writing does next is the best move in the episode. Amber-Linn does not soften it. “Your ability to find new ways to fuck up boggles my mind.” She itemizes a lifetime of his deflections, ending with “The Dyson got stuck on my dick,” a real sentence somebody apparently said in this marriage. Pryce takes none of it well. Ben, the man wearing the award, tries to defuse with “Take it easy on him, honey, he’s had a tough night,” and “Honey” is the word that detonates the room. Bento Ben has been generous. Bento Ben has been there. Bento Ben says ciao because he is a man who has decided to be enthusiastic about small things, which is a quality Pryce used to have and traded for being correct.
Wilson plays the scene with the smallest amount of stagger in his voice, and Maron, on the bench-call earlier, has already given Pryce permission to feel it. The episode’s tonal trick is that we leave the precinct with two break-ups inside the same breath: the marriage Pryce had not yet admitted was over, and the trip Elena is about to call off in the morning.
What this episode argues
Stick’s pilot pitched a redemption arc. The second episode pulls it back and asks whether Pryce is the kind of man who has earned the right to redeem anything. The answer the hour gives is not yes. The answer the hour gives is that the trip is the only thing he has, and the people around him are going to have to decide whether their own reasons for going are stronger than his reasons for needing them to. Mitts agrees because Pryce is hurting and Pryce is right about the kid. Elena almost says no, then says yes, because she is the one who actually heard Grossweiner’s Law and noticed it applied to her. Santi shows up at Pryce’s door with the uncashed check, because the kid is the only character in the episode whose loyalty is not a negotiation.
The other quiet argument is about willy-nilly. Both the banker and Amber-Linn use the word at Elena and Pryce respectively, and the show stages the echo on purpose. Elena, hearing it the second time inside her own kitchen, repeats it back in Spanish to herself, then takes the swing. The trip leaves. The shotgun call comes from Mitts. The boys are back in town, again, and the show has not pretended it was easy.
Verdict
This is the second-episode test most premise comedies fail. The pilot won the audience with a kindness economy and the promise of a road. The follow-up has to break the road, repair it, and make us believe the repair. Stick mostly clears the bar. Pryce’s arrest is a creditable sitcom complication that the show grounds in actual emotional stakes inside the precinct lobby. Elena’s bank scene is the strongest single piece of writing in the half-hour, and the actor playing her plays the helium pitch and the Pretty Woman exit with the same straight face, which is the whole performance. The Grossweiner runner is corny on its face and lands anyway because the show double-deploys it, first as Pryce’s coaching philosophy and then as Santi’s appeal to his mother. The Bento Ben reveal is the rare reveal that gets funnier and sadder on the same line. Where the episode wobbles is the RV-lot opener, which leans on driving-lesson beats the show is going to outgrow, and the back half’s reliance on needle-drops (“The Boys Are Back In Town” twice in fifteen minutes) to substitute for momentum. The kid is still mostly a swing and a posture; the season is writing him an IOU. None of that is fatal. The hour earns the trip. It does not pretend it was deserved.
Rating: 7.9/10