With hiatuses for network television series finally coming to an end after the summer drought, viewers everywhere are ready to glue themselves back to their screens. As it happens, however, one of the most promising new series won’t actually be broadcast on any network. The trailer for Amazon’s new half-hour comedy Red Oaks has hit the web, and it looks pretty great. Check it out!
Set in the summer of 1985, the country club setting of Red Oaks makes comparisons to the classic 1980 comedy Caddyshack inevitable. Nevertheless, the softer touch to humor in the trailer coupled with the clear nostalgia to the 1980s fashion and technology that is actually meant to be funny indicate that Red Oaks will be more of a Dirty Dancing/Wet Hot American Summer hybrid than a Caddyshack knockoff.
The trailer awesomely opens on a pair of striped tube socks and a young man in white short shorts being lectured about his grades on a tennis court. David is trying to sell a C as a perfectly adequate grade, but his father dismisses the passing mark as a “Jewish F.”
The video progresses to show flashes of peacocks on golf courses, lifeguards in fantastic swim suits showing pasty thighs on the boys and hipbones on the girls, a vaguely skeezy man with what can be only described in clinical 21st century terminology as a “pornstache,” and a young lady in a particularly epic leotard and side ponytail. Honestly, the fashion alone is reason enough to rewatch the trailer a few times.
Of course, there’s more to the trailer than fashion so amazingly awful that the target demographic is probably thanking all of the lucky stars in the galaxy that they managed to avoid the 80s. Young David is seen receiving advice from his elders to do everything from skip college altogether, make a quick fortune off the stock market, listen to his father, and use his summer job as a tennis pro to sell his future services as an accountant.
Perhaps the greatest nugget of wisdom comes from a curmudgeonly old fellow, whom we know to be wise just for his ability to combine smoking and drinking with soaking in a pool:
You know what we did back in my day to find ourselves? Killed Nazis.
Produced by Stephen Soderbergh and featuring Craig Roberts as young David, Gage Golightly as Karen (of the epic leotard), and Richard Kind as the quippy father figure, the Red Oaks trailer is a first look at a series with the potential to be fantastic. Or should we say… radical?
Either way, the trailer is two minutes cut together to rev up excitement for the new series that sadly has yet to premiere, but take a chill pill before you have, like, a mondo freakout about the wait. The entire first season of Red Oaks premieres on October 9 on Amazon Prime.
