Marc Maron and Owen Wilson Are About to Make a Much Sadder ‘Happy Gilmore’
Have you ever found yourself watching Happy Gilmore and wondered, “What if this was a TV show, and Chubbs Peterson had depression instead of a fake hand?” Well, Owen Wilson and Marc Maron have you covered.
Ever since Maron made four seasons of his cult-beloved sitcom Maron, Hollywood casting directors have slowly grown more and more fond of casting the perpetually perturbed podcast host and stand-up comedy legend as an embittered or embattled sidekick in slightly depressing comedies. Most notably, Maron appeared in 30 episodes of the cult-beloved and Netflix-canceled semi-professional wrestling dramedy GLOW as the wrestling show’s cynical director Sam Sylvia. Then, yesterday, it was announced that Maron will appear in another sports-themed comedy series about the downtrodden for Apple TV+, co-starring Wilson.
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The yet-untitled comedy series will show Wilson as Pryce Cahill, an over-the-hump former professional golf player whose career and personal life have both fallen apart over the span of decades, who takes on a 17-year-old golf phenom to teach him how to go pro. Maron will play Mitts, Wilson’s former caddy and close friend, with Peter Dager playing the teen prodigy whose hockey career presumably didn’t pan out.
The Deadline writeup of the show only mentions that the golf career of Wilson’s character “was derailed prematurely 20 years ago,” prior to the events of the series, so, until more details are announced, we’re just going to continue to assume that he lost his hand to an alligator on the tour. Seriously, the plot summary of the Wilson/Maron show really does read like some writer decided to do a more dramatic take on the events of Happy Gilmore from Chubbs Peterson’s perspective, but the late, great Carl Weathers wasn’t willing to bet on AppleTV+ for his next project.
Until we see a trailer for this unnamed series we're going to withhold judgment, but it's still funny to think that the writers of sports comedies can't come up with more than a couple different plotlines for a golf project – if we ever see set images of Maron scrambling after a gopher, we'll know for sure that Apple is out of ideas.
