In life, it’s one thing to have potential. It's another to figure out what to do with it.
That has been and continues to be the driving force behind Apple TV’s golf-centered series, 'Stick'. With the second season just about to drop, Owen Wilson’s Pryce Cahill is back on the course and chasing a dream most people would consider unlikely — becoming the oldest golfer ever to win a major.
But as his young protégé, Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager), takes his first steps toward a professional career, Pryce must reckon with an even more difficult question than whether he can still play... is talent enough?
For creator and showrunner Jason Keller, that question was one of the things that made a second season so enticing about this show. Although the story wasn’t locked down in advance, the possibilities were already taking shape as the first season came to a close.
“We started talking generally about Season 2 towards the end of Season 1. If you're into what you're working on and you're excited about what you're writing, it's hard not to think about where you could go with a character or a storyline,” Keller explains.
“Not that we had plotted out Season 2 by the end of Season 1, but we certainly were asking questions like, was Pryce as good as everyone said he was? And if that's true, what was the origin of Pryce and the things that make him self-sabotage sometimes? We were asking all of these little questions.”
For Wilson, answering those queries meant looking beyond Pryce’s natural athletic ability and more into the experiences that shaped it — starting with his introduction to golf and the complicated relationship with his father, which we see a lot of in this sophomore season.
“In just answering those questions, it led to this story that was so interesting to me," says Wilson. "When [the writers] first told me about my dad and then how I got into the game, that then led to the tricky father-son relationship and the ways that we can all sometimes sabotage ourselves.”
As the character’s relationship with golf became more central to the series, Wilson found himself drawn deeper into the sport, discovering that portraying someone whose identity is so closely tied to the game required more than simply looking the part.
"I have gotten really into golf... but I also know there've been plenty of things I've worked on where I was supposed to maybe learn a skill. Like piano for a scene, or I remember I had to learn the saxophone, took lessons, and I made zero progress. I just never got there, and they figured out another way to do it," Wilson finishes.
"When Jason was first talking to me about being the character, this seemed like something very important. I couldn't just say: 'Okay, if I learn it or if I don't learn it, it's no big deal or I'll just wing it.' I really felt I had to, for my own sort of peace of mind or ability to play the character, feel that I knew something about golf."
With this fresh season, as Pryce confronts the past that has kept him from realizing his potential, 'Stick' continues to find the human story beneath the game, exploring the ways failure, family and a little stubborn optimism can shape the road ahead.
'Stick” Season 2 will make its global debut on Apple TV with two episodes on Wednesday, Nov. 4, followed by a new episode every Wednesday through Dec. 30.
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