• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 6, 2024

A new hard-boiled crime series set in the insular world of maple syrup production in Quebec emerges as one of the best new shows of 2024.

It’s “The Sticky,” a show whose plot plays out in snow-laden maple woods in French-speaking Quebec, Canada.

The show’s landscape of leafless trees in the dead of winter, and its storyline of ordinary people in a small town who get caught up in crime, are reminiscent of movies such as “A Simple Plan” (directed by Sam Raimi) and “Fargo” (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) and, by extension, FX’s “Fargo” TV series.

But “The Sticky” is no “Fargo” rip-off. It stands wholly on its own due to the very high quality of its production, including its casting, locations, cinematography, writing and music, among other attributes.

The TV Blog previewed just one half-hour episode -- Episode One (of six) -- and came away with an elevated pulse rate and the hair on my arms standing up, figuratively if not literally.

The star of the show is clearly Margo Martindale, two-time Emmy winner for “The Americans” and one for “Justified,” in which she played the steely matriarch of a rural crime family. Both were FX shows.

She is no crime boss in “The Sticky,” but her character, Ruth Landry, is plenty tough. She is an independent maple syrup producer who is being squeezed by larger maple syrup interests to sell them her private woodlands for a relative pittance.

Two other characters appear poised to join with her in a crime caper involving a spacious warehouse filled with barrels of newly tapped syrup.

The two are the storage facility’s sole security guard (Guillaume Cyr) and an apparent associate of a Boston crime syndicate (Chris Diamantopoulos).

All three have personal, plausible reasons -- both financial and emotional -- for contemplating this complex crime

The show’s location in Quebec is authenticated by the show’s use of French with English subtitles. 

But most of the characters here are also fluent in English as a second language, which keeps the subtitles to a minimum.

“The Sticky” was created and written by Brian Donavon and Ed Herro. It was produced principally by Blumhouse.

Episode One was greatly enhanced by the shrewd insertion of at least two pieces of music -- one a French-language version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (“Knock Knock, Ouvre-Toi Porte Du Ciel”) by Frenchman Hugues Aufray, and the other a French version of “House of the Rising Sun” sung by another Frenchman, the late Johnny Hallyday, under the title “Le pénitencier.”

The latter song is used at the close of Episode One of “The Sticky,” leaving a viewer with an unsettling sense of foreboding, and a desire to drop everything and binge the whole thing right then and there.

“The Sticky” starts streaming on Friday, December 6, on Amazon Prime Video.