The Five Spot: Finally, At Long Last, Margo Martindale Will Steal The Syrup

Also: An important update to the Bluey coin heist and a chunky squirrel

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Oh look, a show for Brian

All I have ever asked for out of life is a television show where Margo Martindale and some Canadian rascals steal a bunch of maple syrup. It didn’t seem like too much to ask. There are shows about so many other things. There are like five shows on right now about doctors or detectives who ride motorcycles. There have been dozens of them over the years. And yet, despite these repeated protests, zero shows about Margo Martindale and some Canadian rascals stealing a bunch of maple syrup. It was so stupid. What else could you idiots have possibly asked for? I would have let you put her on a motorcycle if that was the sticking point. I was never unreasonable about this.

Luckily, someone in Hollywood finally got a single lick of good sense in their brain and made this show happen.

The Sticky is a comedy-drama series about Ruth Landry, a maple syrup farmer who, in defiance of a heartless system, assembles a team to undertake the Canadian heist of the century. The target: the country’s multi-million dollar maple syrup surplus.

Thank you.

Jesus Christ.

Was that so hard?

Apparently it was.

If all of this sounds familiar, or at least familiar-ish, to you, there’s probably a good reason for that: There actually was a real maple syrup heist in Canada about a decade ago. There was a huge piece in Vanity Fair about it that I still have bookmarked. Netflix devoted an episode of its true crime docuseries Dirty Money to it. Some of the people featured in that thing were… incredible.

Screencaps will help. Luckily, I still have those, too. Here’s a black market maple syrup seller who looks almost exactly like what you’d picture if you closed your eyes and said “okay, think of a black market maple syrup seller.”

Here’s a guy with a great haircut whose job is “maple syrup lawyer,” which is just very cool and something that sounds like a job a child would say his imaginary friend has. That or “candy detective.” The candy detective also rides a motorcycle. This will be a show on network television within three years. I will watch that show.

But until then, at least I’ll have The Sticky. I am very excited about this. Like, honestly, truly, zero sarcasm excited. Some of that is the “Margo Martindale and some Canadian rascals stealing a bunch of maple syrup” of it all, sure. But it also looks… really good. And fun. I insist you watch that trailer. I showed so much restraint not mentioning who shows up at the end. You deserve to see that with fresh eyes, too.

In conclusion, I made a screencap from this trailer to use as the featured image for this post on the homepage of this blog and in a rush I just named it “Margo Sticky,” which, now that I sit here and look at it, would be an incredible name for the lead female character in that Candy Detective show we were talking about earlier.

FOUR: There is an important update in the case of the stolen Bluey coins