red oaks

Red Oaks is the latest Amazon Prime series, and interesting not only in its own right but because Amazon still hasn't yet developed much of a brand identity. You have the indie movie feel of Transparent and Red Oaks, the serious alternate history drama of the forthcoming Man in the High Castle, and the awful grumpy-cable-man drama of Hand of God, for instance. Right now I guess they're probably just throwing things at the wall and seeing what people watch, without worrying about consistency across the brand.

When I say "indie movie" vis-a-vis Red Oaks, I don't mean to lump it in with Transparent, which is very different in tone. You could call both of them dramedies, but the drama in Red Oaks is very light, as is the comedy. I was expecting something broader -- either something more like Caddyshack or a send-up of 80s movie tropes. But there isn't a hint of satire in the show, even in the "body swap" episode which, true to its title, has two of the characters swap bodies for the day, Freaky Friday style.

Red Oaks is about a college kid, David -- the kid from Richard Ayoade's excellent Submarine -- who's working as a tennis pro at the local country club in the summer of 1985, while putting off registering for classes because he neither wants to continue with the accounting major his father expects him to pursue, nor confront his father and make this clear. Richard Kind (Mad About You/Spin City) and Jennifer Grey play his parents; Paul Reiser, the president of the club. That alone was enough to get me in the door, and they're all great - Reiser is especially convincing as an entitled prick (as is Josh Meyers as the douchey photographer constantly threatening to steal David's girlfriend away).

If I list plot points, or if you watch the pilot to get the lay of the land, it's going to sound flat and predictable and obvious. David and his girlfriend want different things from the next few years of their lives, and spending most of each day apart from each other due to their jobs gives them ample opportunity to be around other people who may be more compatible or more interesting. David's father has had a heart attack that has resulted in underscoring his insistence on making practical choices -- study accounting because if something happens to me you may have to take care of your mother, and accounting is a reliable field, the subtext seems to say. Meanwhile, David's parents are having problems, and his best friend at the club is obsessed with the lifeguard who's dating a jock whose band has a song called "Sex Flu."

But while it's not a masterpiece or anything, the whole is greater than the sum of those parts, perhaps mainly because of tone: because it isn't satire, it doesn't have the challenge of maintaining satire's edge over a sustained period of time, nor of serving the dual and usually conflicting needs of satire and story. Because it isn't a zany comedy, it doesn't get its characters into impossible to resolve situations every episode. It's funny, but with a light touch; it's drama, but not melodrama. It takes place 30 years ago, but it doesn't slam that home with constant shots of pink legwarmers or "Van Halen will never break up" jokes, and you'd be hard-pressed to call it nostalgic in the manner of The Wonder Years (or even The Goldbergs).

The lack of voiceover helps: we have no idea who David has become in 2015, or how he would look back on these events. Does his girlfriend Karen eventually seem like a minor footnote in his love life, or is this the story of how he and his future wife worked their shit out? A voiceover would probably give it away.

Honestly, the show I am most inclined to compare it to is The O.C., and I'm reluctant to make that comparison because a) if you haven't seen The O.C., your impression of what you think I mean is probably very different from what I mean; b) even if you have seen the show, what you and I mean by The O.C. may be two different things depending on how you feel about Marissa Cooper or the final season; c) the comedy of The O.C. was much broader than Red Oaks', and the drama was more melodramatic.

It's ten half-hour episodes that you can watch in a weekend afternoon; they're not urgent but they're pleasant, smarter than most sitcoms, with very little filler or wasted time.