Maple-syrup heist series The Sticky is proof that we can’t trust Amazon to deliver Canadian TV | Canada Voices

The Sticky, a middling new Prime Video series inspired by the $18.7-million maple-syrup heist of 2012, is what you call “sirop de poteau” in Quebec.

That’s a French expression for the fake high-fructose corn syrup-filled junk that Americans put on their pancakes rather than the real deal that comes from trees. The joke is that it’s made out of sap that came from tapping a poteau – a telephone pole.

The Amazon Canadian Original takes one of the most fascinating true-crime cases in Quebec history – and tries to reverse-osmosis it into a standard crime-that-goes-awry black comedy that seems heavily indebted to Fargo.

But whereas as the Coen brothers lovingly lampooned their home state of Minnesota’s quirks in that 1996 movie, this Prime Video show is co-created by a pair of Americans named Ed Herro and Brian Donovan who show a tin ear to the distinct society that is Quebec throughout. (Canadian Kathryn Borel was credited as a co-showrunner when the show was announced, but left the project before production.)

Now, to be fair, The Sticky is very clear it isn’t aiming to tell a real story. “This is absolutely not the true story of the great Canadian maple syrup heist,” declares a faux disclaimer at the beginning of its six shallow half-hour episodes.

But that’s not really an excuse for the lack of authenticity or even understanding of the setting.

Margo Martindale, one of the great American character actors, gets to play the lead – a maple-syrup farmer named Ruth Landry who is caring for her comatose husband at home.

Ruth’s farm comes under the scrutiny of the fictional Association Érable Québec, headed by a corrupt official named Leonard (honey-voiced veteran Quebec actor Guy Nadon); she’s been deemed a non-licensed operator because her husband’s unconscious.

This act of cruel bureaucracy eventually leads Ruth to team up with security guard Rémy (Guillaume Cyr) and Boston second-tier mobster Mike (Chris Diamantopoulos) to steal millions of dollars of maple syrup from a strategic reserve – an elaborate heist that the series, angling for a second season, cuts away from during the getaway.

Martindale’s not bad casting for a “Ruth Landry,” really; the Texan’s got a bit of a Ginette Reno vibe to her and wouldn’t look out of place in Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-soeurs.

But the moment Ruth starts screaming at an inspector in her first scene, it’s clear that something’s off. “Je suis pas stupid; je parlais français,” she yells.

That this dialogue is subtitled in error-free English as if Ruth’s speaking French properly rather than mangling two simple sentences suggests that there’s a gap between what the creators think they’re putting onscreen and what they actually are.

I waited for some backstory as to how this very anglophone woman ended up living in this francophone community, to no avail; I thought there’d be some mention, too, of how she took her husband’s typically Québécois name Landry, given that’s against the law in the province.

But as soon as Ruth barged into her nemesis Leonard’s office shouting at him in English, it was clear the show had no interest in the sticky linguistic politics of Quebec – even though it would have made the power struggle between the two more unique.

Viewers just have to accept that The Sticky is a show where francophone characters speak accented English to each other on the job.

Now, it’s not that the Quebec actors can’t speak English clearly or anything like that. Indeed, Cyr and Michel Perron’s heartfelt portrayals of the failed-to-launch Rémy and his loving father, respectively, provide the only believable relationship in the show’s otherwise artificial and unanchored world.

But this type of fear-of-subtitles small-screen representation just seems bizarre in the same year that Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai won Emmy Awards for their Japanese-language performances in Shōgun – and when a big chunk of today’s audience is watching with captions on anyway.

Québécois critics don’t seem that offended, mind you. La Presse’s Hugo Dumas, for instance, wrote that the series is “linguistically incoherent” but essentially shrugged it off, focusing on positive aspects of the show’s existence, such as a soundtrack that introduces the music of Michel Pagliaro, Tire le coyote and DJ Champion to Prime Video’s audience.

But, for me, the language muddle is only one of the areas in The Sticky where the disinterest in crossing t’s and dotting i’s in the writing was apparent.

For instance, the character Mike, played in a Bryan Cranston-lite performance by Diamantopoulos, doesn’t make a lick of sense in his sudden shifts from cold-blooded killer to farcical fool – nor, underneath it all, does the intrusion of the Boston mob into a part of North America where there are plenty of powerful organized-crime outfits that are much more colourful.

This isn’t the first time Amazon’s television arm has squandered solid Canadian IP. Three Pines, based on Louise Penny’s very popular Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, lasted just one season and even the author herself was griping about it as it premiered. (“I don’t want readers to think that I’m okey-dokey with everything when obviously it’s not as I would have liked,” she told The Globe and Mail at the time.) That show was run by a British TV maker – which gives you a hint of what the problem might be.

Indeed, I wondered what Simon Barry and the team from Bad Blood, Citytv’s show inspired by Montreal’s Rizzuto crime family, might have made of the maple-syrup heist. Or Jacob Tierney, a writer and director on Letterkenny and the Quebec whisperer on that hit show, in a more comedy-forward take. As the episodes went on, I even started to imagine filmmaker Denys Arcand’s version – with the satire of Québécois bureaucracy turned up to onze.

It’s not really rocket science that to tell certain stories, it makes sense to tap creators who know the territory.