Red Oaks, a new comedy from Amazon, arrives with a hell of a pedigree. It’s produced by Steven Soderbergh and David Gordon Green, Green directs the pilot, and it’s created and written by long-time Soderbergh associates Joe Gangemi and Gregory Jacobs. (Jacobs also directed this summer’s Magic Mike XXL.) Future episodes are directed by people like Amy Heckerling and Hal Hartley. Set in a country club in New Jersey in the mid-’80s, the show openly evokes movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Caddyshack and The Flamingo Kid, and with a consortium of creators who understand both comedy and drama behind it, there’s a lot of hope that it’ll fall into the same realm of bittersweet nostalgia as beloved comedies like The Wonder Years and Freaks and Geeks.
The first episode, which initially aired during one of Amazon’s pilot periods over a year ago, hints at the possibility of that kind of mix of comedy and drama, but also whole-heartedly embraces what’s expected of an ‘80s teen sex comedy. It’s got the nudity, the sex, the drugs and the flippant disregard for authority, and because it’s a premium television show in 2015 none of it is surprising. What’s weird is that those old ‘80s teen movies have felt more and more transgressive since at the least the early 1990s, as teen movies became increasingly clean and conservative. (Some blame John Hughes for that, and the brief run of filthy American Pie knock-offs at the turn of the century was just a blip on the larger teen movie landscape.) If Red Oaks was released as a movie today, and pitched squarely at teenagers, it would feel like a refreshingly edgy homage to those old comedies; because it’s airing in a context where you expect adult material, even in shows that don’t really need it, it merely feels like a refreshingly faithful homage to those old comedies.
All the archetypes you’d expect from those movies are here: the everyman lead who sees through the bullshit around him; the out-of-touch, slightly pathetic parents; the stoner best friend; the “good girl” who’s starting to realize her own sexuality; the artsy hipster who rejects it all and promises the lead an escape to a more interesting life. Craig Roberts (who I’m professionally obligated to mention was so good in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine) is fine as the lead, David, an NYU student who doesn’t want to become an accountant like his dad, but he’s given little to do but react in the first episode. The stand-outs are Richard Kind as his anxious and ailing father and Paul Reiser as the uptight Wall Street banker Getty, who’s the president of the country club. Kind has specialized in sad losers for years now, and here he threatens to break your heart as much as he did in Inside Out, but in a very different way. Meanwhile Reiser fully embraces the assholish tendencies that his characters usually tend to struggle with, and it leads to his most intense and believable performance yet.