American TV has become the equivalent of India’s Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood’s output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been flooding, nay, tsunami-ing us with series. Netflix, the most active of the streamers, has committed a staggering $6 billion this year to produce original material. It is estimated that Amazon will spend over $3 billion.
They are tossing off shows the way Georges Simenon and Isaac Asimov wrote novels. They secure cultural cachet with flashy stuff that commands watercooler conversation (Netflix’s House of Cards, Amazon’s Transparent) while they make bank on the comic-book science-fiction stuff (Stranger Things and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage on Netflix, The Man in the High Castle on Amazon) that draws young men in basements like moths to flames.
These are the programs on which these services spend their promotional dollars. But since they are producing shows by the dozens, many go begging for attention because they’re just too quirky to get the kind of PR support they would need to break into the public consciousness. It is likely you’ve never heard of some really good stuff—in particular, a remarkable show on Amazon called Red Oaks. So I’m telling you about it.
I suppose you’d call Red Oaks a sitcom because each episode runs a half-hour, and it centers on college-age kids working at a country club. Its direct cinematic influences are the golf comedy Caddyshack, the coming-of-age-at-a-beach-club Matt Dillon picture called The Flamingo Kid, and the high-school-kids-warts-and-all Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But it’s not jokey, it’s not wild and wacky, and it’s not exaggerated.
It is, rather, a pitch-perfect re-creation of a certain time (1985), a certain place (northern New Jersey), and a certain type of people (secular Jews). If Philip Roth had written a screenplay for a film directed by John Hughes, Red Oaks would have been the result. Call it Goodbye, Columbus meets Risky Business. I would never have believed that such a mash-up could be anything but a calamity, but Red Oaks is something very special.
David Meyers (the British actor Craig Roberts, who you’d never know is British) is a college-age kid working as a tennis pro at the Red Oaks Country Club. David looks like a classic nebbish—short, skinny, big-nosed—but this show is too interesting to stick with first impressions. David turns out to be a first-class athlete with a gorgeous girlfriend named Karen (Gage Golightly), who was the head cheerleader in high school and is now the club’s aerobics instructor. He is the only child of an accountant (Richard Kind) and a dissatisfied housewife approaching 50 (Jennifer Grey), who want him to get a nice safe job like his father’s. David has larger ambitions—to go to NYU and make movies. The family doesn’t have the money. David’s mother asks his father if he’s happy: “Happy?” he says. “I’m happy if I look at the obituary page and I’m not listed.”
The club’s president is a slick, hard-charging Wall Street guy named Doug Getty (Paul Reiser), who likes to hit with David but can’t help belittling him. Getty has a blowsy and florid wife (Gina Gershon, the 1990s direct-to-video bombshell, in a revelatory role) and a hip would-be bohemian daughter named Skye who is David’s age. David and Skye are attracted to each other, but he’s got Karen—or at least he does until the photographer who does most of the club’s life-cycle events (a hilarious Josh Meyers) begins seducing her with the promise of making her a model.
Over the course of two seasons, these characters bounce off each other like billiard balls. They are interesting, flawed, tough, not always nice. There are divorces, heart attacks, arrests, drug deals. The two poles on the show are David’s father and Getty—the first a good man who has never sought more than his own tiny portion and the second an ambitious go-getter up from nothing who cuts corners, suffers no fools, and is in danger of indictment for insider trading. Which one will David emulate? He has his father’s thoughtfulness but Getty’s drive. The precise and beautiful performances by Richard Kind and Paul Reiser in these parts (they worked for years together on Mad About You) are among the most memorable in any show of the “peak TV” age.
The secret to Red Oaks‘ brilliance is its social exactitude. (The show goes off the rails in only 1 episode of the 20 that have been made, a lame and awkward pseudo-tribute to the bad father-son body-switching movie comedies of the 1980s.) The precision with which its creative team—writers Joe Gangemi and Gregory Jacobs and executive producer David Gordon Green—have captured the look and feel of the time and place makes Red Oaks feel more real and more substantial than the movies that inspired it. It’s the closest thing to an old-fashioned coming-of-age novel made for American TV. No wonder Amazon didn’t quite know how to sell it, but those who find it are fortunate indeed.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
