‘Red Oaks’ Returns for Another Nostalgic Season
Red Oaks, the likable little streaming sitcom about young people in the 1980s, begins its second season on Amazon Prime on Friday. The new season finds its young hero, aspiring filmmaker and New Jersey country-club tennis pro David (Craig Roberts), pursuing both his career dreams and Skye (Alexandra Socha), the aspiring painter whose ambitions are just as big.
Since Red Oaks’ first season premiered, Netflix’s Stranger Things has done its own ’80s nostalgia trip and garnered a lot more attention than this mild sitcom. But when it comes to summoning up that decade, Oaks is just as good — precise in its details and for the most part rarely exaggerating the hairstyles, the fashions, or the music for mere campy effect.
The new season begins with David visiting Skye in Paris, where she’s spending the summer taking art classes and sketching David in the nude. It’s all going swimmingly until her parents, played with bumptious energy by Paul Reiser and Gina Gershon, arrive unexpectedly.
Soon enough, though, everyone’s back in Jersey, where Reiser’s Doug Getty is facing legal problems as well as a threat to his presidency at the Red Oaks Country Club. Reiser plays the role well, but in the early episodes of the season, there doesn’t seem to be much firmly established motivation for him to be so hostile toward David. Yes, he’s a protective dad for Skye, but the scripts call for him to be aggressively angry in a manner that works against the show — even David, not the boldest character, doesn’t seem very intimidated, perhaps because Getty is just too ridiculously over the top.
Richard Kind and Jennifer Grey are back as David’s parents, now in the process of divorce. David’s pal Wheeler (Oliver Cooper) is still trying to capture the attention of blond-goddess lifeguard Misty (Alexandra Turshen) while also aiming to move up from country-club valet to bartender. Caught in the middle of every subplot, Roberts, as David, remains the series’ greatest strength, bringing subtlety to a show that sometimes strains for early-period Woody Allen-style humor.
For a show that comes from big-league moviemakers such as producer-directors Steven Soderbergh, David Gordon Green, and Hal Hartley, Oaks remains assiduously small-scale, and that only works toward its charm. (Compared with ABC’s blasting ’80s sitcom The Goldbergs, Red Oaks is a masterpiece of low-key discretion.) The pacing is sometimes tediously slow, but for the most part, Oaks is cozily welcoming.
Red Oaks Season 2 is streaming on Amazon Prime now.
