Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.
There’s a welcome efficiency to “The Sticky,” Amazon Prime Video’s story of a Canadian maple syrup heist that tells its story in six tightly constructed 30-minute episodes, yet its reach exceeds its grasp as it tries to mimic “Fargo”-style dark comedy. “The Sticky” isn’t as funny as its premise suggests. It’s entertaining enough at times but not quite laudatory.
The always-excellent Margo Martindale (“The Americans”) stars as Ruth, a salt-of-the-earth, salty-mouthed maple syrup farmer in Quebec who gets caught up in a maple syrup heist when local bureaucrats threaten her way of life for selfish gain.
Now streaming all episodes, “The Sticky” is inspired by actual events — there was a real $18 million maple syrup heist in 2011-12 in Quebec — but the characters and beats of this show’s story are fiction.
Ruth isn’t a criminal at heart, but she’s pushed into criminal acts by the unscrupulous head of the maple syrup trade association who does her dirty. This leads Ruth to work with a temperamental Boston mobster Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos). Mike brings in oafish French-Canadian security guard Remy (Guillaume Cyr), who knows he’s the only guard of a warehouse full of maple syrup reserves.
Eventually, Jamie Lee Curtis shows up in the penultimate episode as a leader from Mike’s criminal organization. She’s intense, intimidating and a welcome addition, but “The Sticky” doesn’t give her enough to do.
The “Fargo” of it all — from dimbulb crooks to music cues — sets up an expectation that “The Sticky” will wrap its story by the end of its first season. But it doesn’t. Showrunners Brian Donovan and Ed Herro (“American Housewife,” “The Neighbors”) clearly intend to continue the story.
Donovan said they never considered making “The Sticky” as a limited series. Instead, they were inspired by another TV crime drama.
“A big inspiration for us was ‘Breaking Bad’ and how it explores the gradual devolution of desperate people in even more desperate circumstances,” Donovan said. “It has always been our goal to see how regular people are changed by entering the world of crime. … We’d love to play with [that dynamic] over the course of three, four or five seasons.”
Donovan and Herro pitched “The Sticky” as a five-season series with an emphasis on the three characters at its center.
“Our triumvirate of underdogs — Ruth, Remy, and Mike, three people several rungs down the ladder of power, influence, and income — (are) our guiding light,” Donovan said. “They’re three characters who the world has counted out and (they) decide not to take that lying down. How does danger change them? How far will they go to get what they want, and once they get it, will they be happy with the result? That’s what we love about this story: the beginning, middle and end of regular people who decide to become outlaws.”
As for fictionalizing a real event, Donovan said the beats of what happened in real life wouldn’t have made for a compelling story.
“ ‘The Sticky’ is a show about a comical-sounding heist, but it’s also about these people and a specific region,” he said. “To us, that was a more fun, interesting story to tell than one simply about the crime. The crime itself was kinda dull. The robbers had a smart system and repeated it over and over. Effective, but not super good TV.”