Parents' Guide to The Sticky

With impressive aplomb, this series pulls off a tricky balance: It's at once tragic, compelling, and boasts a pitch-black comic sensibility that keeps its central story from becoming a bummer. National treasure Margo Martindale is the actor chiefly responsible for keeping The Sticky's delicate stew simmering; her Ruth Landry is simply remarkable, at once wounded and furious, hilariously profane when facing friends-turned-business-rivals, then touchingly tender when caring for her longtime husband Martin, whose coma caused the couple's maple syrup farm to slide from profitable to nearly bankrupt. But Martindale isn't the only ace in this stacked deck: Chris Diamantopoulos is both hateable and relatable as Mike, the guy whose criminal connections set The Sticky's story in motion, while Guillaume Cyr's Remy is the stooge of this story, with ambitions far beyond his cunning.

What it will most likely remind viewers of is Fargo, both movie and series. Like Fargo, The Sticky centers on salt-of-the-earth characters in a rural-ish, icy locale who get involved in something criminal. Like Fargo, the criminal enterprise quickly goes off the rails, creating terrible consequences for every character involved. And finally, like Fargo, The Sticky is based on a real-life criminal case, but fictionalizes both story and character so it's both more arch and more entertaining than real life. The Sticky's crime is, of course, much weirder and less awful (at least at first) than the kidnapping-turned-murder tale Fargo tells, but at their heart, both are about good people who do bad things due to desperation and a hefty dose of naivete. The Sticky is funny, sad, and impossible to look away from once viewers are properly stuck, a television treat that's sweet indeed.