Stick Season 2 Opens at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Seven Reviews Got It There.

Stick came back to Apple TV+ on Wednesday with two episodes and, within a day, a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. The site listed Season 2 at 100% from seven critic reviews on 4 November 2026, the day after 9to5Mac flagged the premiere. Fewer than 50 audience ratings had been logged, and no Popcornmeter percentage was posted. Apple's schedule puts the other eight episodes out weekly through 30 December.

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The seven notices behind that score do not agree with each other. One said the season "delivers a richly rewarding payoff." Another ran under the headline "Barely Makes The Cut." The score and the split are both real, because a 100% rating and a divided critical reception are answers to different questions.

What seven reviews can support

Rotten Tomatoes counts each review as fresh or rotten. The percentage is the share of counted notices marked fresh, not a star average. A small batch of positive reviews can therefore produce 100% while the reviews themselves disagree about what works. Seven is small enough that a single negative notice would end the perfect run.

Season 1 is the local precedent. It finished at 79% on Rotten Tomatoes, MovieWeb reported in June 2025, after early scores that sat at 40% and 50% while reviews were still arriving. The final number was respectable. The early numbers were noise. Season 2 is at the noisy end of that curve now, one day into a ten-episode run.

There is another reason to slow down. Several of these reviews were published before the premiere. ScreenRant's ran on 30 October, Collider's on 29 October, AVForums' on 1 November. Critics were almost certainly working from screeners, and the number of episodes they received was not the same.

The notices, in their own terms

RogerEbert.com published on 4 November after screening the full season, under the headline "Apple TV's 'Stick' Stays On Par For Its Second Season." The review says the season avoids the sophomore slump and "delivers a richly rewarding payoff." That is the strongest notice in the batch, and it comes with the widest viewing of the season.

InBetweenDrafts went further with 9/10, describing Season 2 as a heartfelt story about belonging. FandomWire gave it 7/10 and credited the ensemble's chemistry, warmth and sincerity. Times Now's 3.5/5 said the season wisely refocuses on Pryce. Pop Culture Maniacs, at 3/5, put the case plainly: the show "isn't exactly a great show. But it's certainly improved over season one."

Then there is ScreenRant, which ran 5/10 under the headline "Owen Wilson's Golf Dramedy Barely Makes The Cut." The review calls Stick an easy feel-good watch, then says underdeveloped writing and filler scenes keep it from standing out. Golf, in that reading, feels interchangeable. The same review suggests bingeing all ten episodes in December, which is an odd recommendation for a season it had just marked down.

Read together, the notices divide on what they want the show to be. The positive ones grade the season on feeling: does it move you, does the cast click, does the ending land. The negative ones grade it on construction: are the scenes doing work, does the sport matter, would this scene survive a tighter edit. Those rubrics rarely agree, and a 100% tally flattens them into a single fresh-or-rotten mark.

Collider and AVForums land on the positive side. Collider's headline says the series "finally finds its swing in Season 2" and credits the larger role for Timothy Olyphant. AVForums calls the season "much better" than the first, with sharper focus, and notes the 4K Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos presentation. GolfPass, publishing on premiere day, is different in kind: it saw five of the ten episodes and came away mixed, arguing that the show "starts to find its stance but keeps getting golf wrong."

The show the reviews are arguing about

Stick is Jason Keller's comedy-drama about Pryce Cahill (Owen Wilson), a former PGA prodigy whose on-course meltdown ended the career he was supposed to have. He is mentoring Santi Wheeler (Peter Dager), a teenager with a better swing and a clearer future. Marc Maron plays Mitts, Pryce's old caddie. Lilli Kay is Zero, Mariana Treviño is Elena. The show carries a TV-MA rating.

Season 2 rearranges the setup. Pryce starts swinging his own clubs again and considers a comeback, with the aim, per ScreenRant, of becoming the oldest player to win a PGA major. Santi turns professional and deals with endorsements and a public image he did not have to manage before. Olyphant's Clark Ross, Pryce's former rival, moves from recurring to main, and the character becomes more of an ally and mentor. Rhea Seehorn joins as Amanda, an old flame who is now a swing coach. John Higgins plays Santi's agent.

That is a lot of machinery for a show that critics keep describing as low-stakes comfort viewing. It also explains the split. A season about a teenager turning pro is one show. A season about a washed-up pro taking his own swing back is another. The reviews that like Season 2 tend to describe the second version. The ones that don't tend to describe the first.

Season 1 premiered in June 2025 and became a streaming hit, reaching No. 1 on the US streaming charts in July 2025, according to Collider. That success explains the second season's size: ten episodes, a weekly rollout that runs through the holidays, and a cast expansion that adds Seehorn and promotes Olyphant. It also supplies the right comparison. A show that reached No. 1 gets judged against its own first season, and 79% is the number Season 2 has to beat, not 100%.

The Apple dramedy lane, and where Stick sits in it

Apple TV+ has built a run of comedies in a recognizable shape: a damaged older man, a younger person who needs him, an ensemble that behaves like a surrogate family, and dialogue that borrows the vocabulary of therapy. Ted Lasso did it with football and relentless decency. Shrinking did it with grief and a therapist who ignores his own advice. Stick is the golf version, and it arrives with the same promises of warmth, sincerity and a second chance.

Whether that is a compliment depends on which notice you read. The favorable ones use the lane's own language: heartfelt, warm, sincere, a story about belonging. The unfavorable ones say the writing is thin and the golf is scenery. ScreenRant's complaint is the more useful of the two. If the sport is interchangeable, Stick is an ensemble comedy with a golf course in the background, and the tournament supplies texture rather than stakes. GolfPass makes a narrower point: the show depicts golf badly. Those are different criticisms. A series can survive the second. The first is harder to fix in a later season.

RogerEbert.com and Collider suggest the repair is internal. Give Pryce his own swing back, enlarge Olyphant, let the comeback carry the middle episodes. That is a bet that the show works when its star has something to lose, not when he is only reacting to a teenager's rise. The notices split roughly along that line, which makes the next eight episodes the real test of whether the improvement is structural or just a stronger first two hours.

"Starts to find its stance but keeps getting golf wrong." — GolfPass, which reviewed five of the ten episodes

What is confirmed, and what is not

Confirmed: the show is back, the premiere was two episodes, ten episodes run through 30 December, and the cast changes described above are part of it. The Rotten Tomatoes figure was accurate as a snapshot on 4 November. Season 1's final 79% and its early 40% and 50% readings are on the record.

Not confirmed: whether the 100% survives the next three weeks, whether audiences agree (the rating pool is still under 50), and whether Apple will say how many people watched. The company has not released viewership figures for this season. The claim that Season 2 is better than Season 1 is a critical judgment. Most of the seven notices support it, including the mixed ones, but it is not a measurement.

The audience score is the piece to watch first, because it will answer a question the critics cannot: whether the show's warmth travels beyond the people paid to sit through screeners. It may also be slow to arrive. Fewer than 50 ratings is not a sample anyone should read as a verdict.

The number will move

It almost has to. Eight more episodes, a finale on 30 December, and a review pool that will grow past seven. By then it will be easier to tell whether the 100% was an early reading of a genuinely improved season or an artifact of a small sample.

The useful question is not whether Stick Season 2 is at 100%, because it will not stay there. It is whether the season's better instincts, the ones RogerEbert.com and Collider responded to, hold once Pryce's comeback has to carry whole episodes instead of a premiere. That answer arrives with the finale. The current score is a first impression from seven critics, and it is already doing more work than it can bear.

Cover image: Owen Wilson as Pryce Cahill in Stick Season 2, courtesy of Apple TV+.