'Red Oaks' Review: Smart Nostalgia

Red Oaks, the new sitcom that starts streaming on Amazon Prime on Friday, is an exceptionally well-made nostalgia piece. It follows David Meyers (Craig Roberts), an NYU student who, in 1985, is spending his summer is suburban New Jersey as an assistant tennis coach at the Red Oaks Country Club. Seeking to escape the cloying home atmosphere of his squabbling parents (Richard Kind and Jennifer Grey), he allows himself to be taken under the wing of the country club’s rich, arrogant president (Paul Reiser) mostly because he’s attracted to the guy’s artsy, rebellious daughter (Alexandra Socha).

That’s the bare-bones outline, and it might sound a bit seen-it-all-before, but it’s what Red Oaks does with this material that makes the series worth watching. Most television doesn’t come with a better pedigree than Oaks: It’s executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, continuing his full-time attention to TV along with The Knick, whose new season starts next week. The fine director David Gordon Green (George Washington, Pineapple Express, Eastbound and Down) produces and helms a few episodes, and other directors include Hal Hartley and Amy Heckerling. The show was co-created by Gregory Jacobs (Magic Mike XXL; HBO’s Behind the Candelabra) and novelist Joe Gangemi.

That’s a lot of talent, behind and in front of the cameras. Yet everyone’s goal here seems to be to keep Red Oaks a modest, low-key effort, shrewdly funny on the subjects of class, parenthood, and marriage, and sometimes slapstick when it comes to the wacky shenanigans of David and his country-club employees, most prominently Ennis Esmer’s Nash, a devilishly ambitious, horny club tennis pro.

The show provides Reiser with the best showcase for abilities in a long time—his Getty is a creep with a soft heart. Young Roberts holds his own with Reiser, and makes his interchanges with Socha’s character sharp. (This is the only TV show you’re going to see that uses the nude portraits of painter Alice Neel as a clever way to reveal the characters of the two young lovers.)

If Red Oaks sometimes plays like some kind of cross between Caddyshack and Goodbye, Columbus, it’s also got its own streak of romantic originality that keeps you watching one episode after another.

Red Oaks is streaming now on Amazon Prime.