As soon as Margo Martindale walked away with the second season of Justified, it became inevitable. Her rich portrayal of the show’s second-season lead villain Mags Bennett is exactly the kind of turn that vaults a reliable character actor and veteran scene-stealer to the next level of audience awareness. It also sets into motion a more starstruck form of casting, where the performer will eventually be given the leeway and screentime to overact like crazy, based on the assumption that audiences will delight in their every outburst. Martindale was too busy, in-demand and skilled for it to happen right away, but The Sticky, a new series on Prime Video, makes up for any lost time, placing Martindale in a leading role and then having her scream, emote, swear and do that thing where a character saying another character’s name a lot is supposed to be hilarious.
Playing the Canadian maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry, the object of her scorn – the guy whose name gets repeated in place of the show having jokes – is Leonard (Guy Nadon), the greedy and seemingly corrupt head of a syrup governing body whose actual function is not fully or clearly explained during the first season’s six episodes. Leonard is after Ruth’s land, knowing she’s in a bind with her husband (whose name is on all the farm’s paperwork) in a coma. Ruth refuses to give up, storming into Leonard’s office, storming through the streets in her truck, swearing up a storm at anyone else in her path, and generally giving the usually nuanced Martindale the opportunity to turn every dial up to 10. She’s more subdued in later episodes than in the first couple, but by that point the show has more mostly unfunny business to deal with.
Despite her animosity toward Leonard and the whole system, it’s not Ruth’s idea to rip off a warehouse that stores massive amounts of valuable syrup. That comes from the underappreciated Remy (Guillaume Cyr), who has been toiling away as the facility’s sole security guard. After his calls for stronger security go unheeded, Remy decides to make a bigger move, approaching a local mob hand, Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos), with a plan to rip off some barrels of syrup and make a tidy million-dollar profit by selling it off separately. Intrigued, and uninterested in telling his higher-up, far-away bosses about the job, Mike agrees, and the mismatched pair eventually becomes a bickering trio with the addition of Ruth. As soon as they agree to work together, further complications ensue, as they so often do.
These characters and complications do not adhere to the actual “great Canadian maple syrup heist” that occurred in 2011, when the show is also set (and, in a weird coincidence, the year of Martindale’s big Justified breakout). Each episode announces upfront, with what it seems to consider delightful cheek, that what follows is “absolutely not the true story” of the crime that inspired the series. The show might be better served by simply explaining that the events you’re about to see are obviously inspired by the inferior TV version of Fargo – a program that the busy Martindale has somehow not appeared on so far. The Sticky creators Brian Donovan and Ed Herro share Fargo’s eye for criminal bumbling and detailed quirks, but not the show’s discipline; whatever you think of its various seasons, Fargo has some admirably deadpan and memorable performances. The most memorable aspect of The Sticky’s ensemble is that almost everyone (including a guest-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, who also produces) does too much – though Cyr’s Remy operates in a more believable register than the others, even if the show doesn’t ever settle on how much of a lummox he actually is.
With most episodes running under 30 minutes, The Sticky moves along – quickly enough, in fact, to inspire initial questions about why what amounts to two hours and change haven’t been honed into a single feature film. The demoralizing answer is that this isn’t a Fargo-style anthology, and the show has every intention of spilling into another season at least. In retrospect, it makes much of this season feel like dithering around the idea of a heist, rather than allowing the audience to enjoy the details and mechanics of one. The characters lack the depth necessary to sustain this meandering – so even half-amusing moments tend to flail around in a netherworld between caricatured comedy and pitiless dramatic thriller. If you think people constantly saying “shut the fuck up” to each other is hilarious, however, The Sticky has you covered. If you don’t, you may still empathize with the request.
The Sticky is now available on Amazon Prime
