Maple syrup has an efficiency problem.
Depending on sugar content, the ratio of sap required to yield syrup is typically in the range of 40:1, which is why “real” maple syrup comes at a high price and why your more commercially recognizable syrups tend to be evasive when it comes to their “maple” content.
The Sticky
More sap than syrup, Amazon‘s The Sticky has efficiency problems of its own.
The Sticky is very much representative of a recent television trend toward programming that’s been packaged in a way that’s ill-suited to its narrative. What’s premiering on Amazon Prime Video is the six-part first season of an ongoing series, when the plot gives all indications that its ideal incarnation would be as a charming 90-minute indie movie of the sort that once would have prompted a Sundance bidding war. Or maybe as a 65-minute premiere for a new season of Fargo — Far-Goo, if you will.
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Alternately, it seems equally possible that it might have been more suited to a longer format. While the story already feels stretched thin, its six non-conclusive episodes run only a half-hour apiece, and the series as a whole could stand to be quirkier or more character-driven, or to offer a better sense of its Quebec setting. So maybe six 50-minute episodes with a conclusive ending would have been more satisfying.
Both too much and not enough, The Sticky at least deserves credit for moving fast and giving Margo Martindale a well-deserved stint at the top of the call sheet.
The Emmy-winning television institution plays Ruth Landry, a maple syrup farmer in a small Quebec city. Ruth is a local fixture, but her husband has been in a coma for several years. Sensing weakness, Guy Nadon’s Leonard Gauthier, scheming head of the provincial sugar governing body (the AEQ, or Association Érable Québec) decides to push her off of her land — first with regulatory authority and then by various questionably legal means.
Facing a different sort of desperation is Remy Bouchard (Guillaume Cyr), the lone security guard at the warehouse that counts as the maple syrup reserve, a storage facility for hundreds of barrels worth tens or possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. Remy, not the brightest bulb, feels overlooked and easily maligned. All he wants is reinforcements to help him at his clearly important job, but he keeps getting rebuffed by Leonard and his son and second-in-command, Léo Gauthier (Mickaël Gouin).
So Remy reaches out to Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos), longtime bagman for a Boston organized crime family. Mike’s duties include shaking down small businesses and basic gardening at the mansion owned by … truly, I’m not sure who.
Almost nothing about Mike’s character makes any sense. For reasons that eventually get revealed, his ambitions made him a laughingstock, so I guess it follows that the family would dispatch him to a nothing job in a nothing place. But one moment he’s meek and spineless, the next he’s psychotically violent. He’s apparently been doing this exact thing for years, but half of the locals make fun of him and half have no clue who he is. He keeps saying that Ruth’s comatose husband is “like a brother” to him, but there’s no indication of how or why that could possibly be the case.
And for some reason, although the Boston mob in Quebec is making collections only from dinky farmers and owners of local businesses, Mike has no connection at all to the only financially flush organization in the province. So when Remy approaches him at a local hibachi restaurant — Mike is there with a girlfriend who’s never seen before or mentioned after — and proposes that they rob the syrup reserve, Mike treats the possibility like completely new information.
He’s intrigued, and, knowing Ruth is in dire straits, asks her to come aboard. As their criminal plot and their body count begin to escalate, local law enforcement starts to take notice in the form of Gita Miller’s Teddy — along with Valérie Nadeau (Suzanne Clément), a detective dispatched from Montreal without explanation. Neither police officer has a personality to speak of, but at some point, apropos of nothing, they find themselves holding hands. I mention this not as a spoiler, but to reflect how thin the storytelling is here.
So much happens that makes no sense, to the point where I just wanted to raise my hand in the hopes that creators Brian Donovan and Ed Herro might show me the excised script pages that I’m sure offered an explanation for all of the logical gaps left unfilled in favor of general expediency. The Sticky has the shape of a plot, but not an actual plot.
The shapelessness goes back to the origins of the Blumhouse Television production. There was, indeed, a maple syrup heist in Quebec back in 2011 to 2012, but the opening titles makes it clear that, “This is absolutely not the true story of The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist.” Presumably, the writers were excited by the general existence of a national maple syrup reserve and decided to leave behind the facts — documented in Netflix’s Dirty Money — in favor of a more conventional and also more limited variation on the bumbling small-town heist genre.
Even before the characters make a reference to Nancy Kerrigan, my notes had compared The Sticky to Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya. Both projects share a similar eye for the grotesquerie of the banal, with a generally condescending perspective toward rural desperation. This series is less mocking of its de-glammed subjects than that movie was, but only a little. There simply isn’t enough dimension to any of the characters or their community to generate the empathy necessary to make this sort of storytelling fly — this despite generally “feeling” right, thanks to filming locations in Quebec.
The character most consistently sneered at is probably Diamantopoulos’s Mike, who keeps slipping and falling in the snow and complaining about the cold. I don’t think the show has any real affection for Remy, but thanks to the presence of Remy’s loving father, well-played by Michel Perron, he has perhaps the series’ lone sympathetic relationship.
None of the performances, mind you, convey that contempt. Cyr plays Remy as pathetic, but justifiably frustrated with his status as local punching bag. Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer on the series, shows up for one episode of scenery-chewing and does it well. Diamantopoulos, an actor who loves to go as big as the material can stand, resists a lot of availably broad choices, including a Boston accent, which must’ve been a conversation.
As it stands, the only actors doing Quebecois accents are the actors who actually hail from Quebec, which is a smart choice. As much as I wish The Sticky had been a bit zanier or funnier, the risk of the whole thing feeling like a Letterkenny subplot might have been very real. There are a lot of easy French-Canadian jokes that the series eschews. Not that they were replaced by better jokes — they just seem to have been left on the trimming floor, along with backstory and logistics.
Whatever grounding this show has comes from having Martindale at its center. Her character spends a lot of time swearing and people and getting increasingly irritated, but it’s hard to blame her and easy to feel for her. The only people who won’t compare Ruth to kindly yet vicious criminal matron Mags Bennett are people who haven’t watched the second season of Justified. Those are the luckiest people of all. Skip The Sticky. Watched Justified. No efficiency problems there.
