Are you familiar with “Fargo,” the beloved 1996 Coen brothers film about a group of inept criminals in small town North Dakota? The new series “The Sticky,” about a notorious maple syrup theft in Canada in 2011, certainly hopes so.
The show, out Friday on Prime Video, evokes the film in a multitude of ways. There’s the freezing cold climate, for one. The whole series takes place in the dead of winter, and characters are perpetually swatting away barren branches and slipping in snow and ice. There are hardened, violent criminals and down-on-their-luck types who get mixed up together in a crime. There are even accents you may not be familiar with here, though in place of the Minnesotan tones of “Fargo,” “The Sticky” swaps in the French-inflected accents of Quebec. But most of all, it’s the show’s depiction of its lawbreakers’ ineptitude that most calls to mind the film.
Leading the crew is Ruth, who’s played by the beloved character actress Margo Martindale. Ruth has an almost cartoonishly sympathetic plight: her husband Martin has been in a coma since an accident years earlier, and she tends to their maple trees while also caring for him in the home. But the cartoonishly evil (yes, that’s two cartoonishlys already) Leonard Gauthier (Guy Nadon), who heads the local maple syrup association, is trying to force her off her farm over the bureaucratic flaw that her husband’s name is on the deed, but she’s the one doing the farming. Ruth needs money, and fast, a problem she brings to her friend Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos), who has some kind of vague history with Martin, but more importantly, connections to a criminal family in Boston.
He initially shoots her down, until he’s approached by the gentle and overlooked Remy (Guillaume Cyr), a longtime security guard at Leonard’s maple syrup storage facility. Remy has been trying to get Leonard and his son Leo to hire a security staff to accompany him, but neither of them takes him seriously, and so he decides the real solution is to take advantage of their lax security … which is him. After he overhears Mike talking about Crime Stuff in a restaurant bathroom (again, the hallmark of these characters is incompetence), the two of them, plus Ruth, unite to rob Leonard of his warehouse of syrup.
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What follows is a parade of failure. Mike does have connections to organized crime, but he’s also a violent weirdo who doesn’t actually know how to lead a heist. Remy quickly realizes he’s in over his head after getting to know Mike better, but can’t get out, and offers little to the team besides his access to the warehouse. Ruth is less foolish than the others, though it says little for her that she would ally with such a pair of doofuses when a lengthy prison sentence is on the line.
It perhaps goes without saying, but nearly every performance on this show is dialed up to 11. Martindale, ordinarily a performer of impressive nuance, is stuck swinging between angry and rolling her eyes at people who think she’s too angry. Leonard is inches away from twirling his mustache in villainy at all times. Cyr as Remy fares best — he’s a little pathetic, but there’s an earnestness to him that makes him more soulful. And if you’re excited by the notion that one of these characters is from Boston, the show doesn’t do too much with it. It’s not particularly clear what significance there is that Mike is from Boston, beyond an occasional menacing phone call with a man with a Boston accent. A late season appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis, also an executive producer on the show, can’t even turn things around.
If there’s a fatal flaw here, it’s that “The Sticky” often feels too enamored of its own concept. When people are ranting about syrup, it’s exhausting. When it settles in to the misadventures of Ruth, Remy, and Mike, it works better, and is often funny. The trio stays mere steps ahead of a pair of law enforcement officers, one a determined local (Teddy Green) and one a cynical and glamorous Montreal detective (Suzanne Clément) sent in to save the day. They’re less buffoonish than the criminals they’re chasing, but that doesn’t mean they’re capable of solving any crimes.
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It’s true that the “Fargo” model can work beyond the movie — witness the ongoing, generally critically acclaimed TV show spun off from it on FX. But “The Sticky” seems to have taken the core premise and just turned the volume up. Desperate people may make desperate choices to darkly comic effect, but without more depth to the storytelling, it’s hard to get too invested in them.
THE STICKY
Starring: Margo Martindale, Chris Diamantopoulos, Guillaume Cyr
On: Amazon Prime
Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at lisa.weidenfeld@globe.com. Follow her on X @LisaWeidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.
