'Red Oaks' Preview: Jennifer Grey Is Still Dirty Dancing
Along with Comedy Central’s Moonbeam City and ABC’s Wicked City, Amazon’s new teen comedy Red Oaks is the latest fall series to take place in the 1980s. But this series has something that those other two don’t: Jennifer Grey doing some old school dirty dancing. The former Frances “Baby” Houseman can be seen getting her groove on — in her underwear, no less — in this exclusive clip from the fourth episode of Red Oaks, which premieres on Amazon on Oct. 9. Creator Gregory Jacobs describes the semi-autobiographical series to Yahoo TV as “Caddyshack meets The Graduate,” with the Caddyshack influence coming through most strongly in the show’s setting: the titular country club. Instead of slinging golf clubs, however, the Graduate stand-in, David (Craig Roberts), wields a mean racket as a tennis instructor.
“Tennis instructor” was Jacobs’s summer job when he was an aimless college student during the ‘80s. “Traditionally, coming of age stories are about high school kids, but for me in particular, my early 20s was an intriguing time. I felt I was getting tugged in a lot of different directions.” After years of regaling his friends with stories about his wayward youth, Jacobs was encouraged to turn that fact into fiction by his pal and collaborator, Steven Soderbergh. “Originally, I was thinking of doing it as a fun little independent movie, but while we were working on Behind the Candelabra for HBO, Steven said to me, ‘Why don’t you think about television?’”
The idea took root, and Jacobs crafted a 10-episode first season, which has been brought to life by a bevy of impressive feature film directors who also have roots in the ‘80s and ‘90s, among them, Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Hal Hartley (Trust) and David Gordon Green (who didn’t direct his first film until 2000, but has made a series of ‘80s throwbacks like The Pineapple Express and The Sitter). “It was like a crash course in directing,” says Roberts. “Hal doesn’t say, ‘This is how you should say the line,’ but rather, ‘After you say the line, turn your head to the right.’ Whereas Amy is very clever with each line and how it can be performed. And then David is the strangest director you’ve ever worked with in your life! They all allow you the freedom to mess around and try stuff, but the writing is so good, you don’t need to.”
Although David is loosely modeled after Jacobs, Roberts says he wasn’t consciously imitating the Red Oaks creator. It helped that Jacobs fleshed out his alter ego’s fictional history by casting Grey and Richard Kind as his bickering parents (Kind stands in for Patrick Swayze as Grey’s dirty dancing partner in the above clip) and Paul Reiser as the country club president, who, in the pilot, plays two very intense tennis games against his younger opponent. “Craig and Paul were really playing in some cases and, in other cases, they were strategically doubled,” says Jacobs. “We didn’t want to have these longs, expensive takes of them actually playing. A little bit goes a long way.” On the other hand, it’s nice to see that, three decades after Dirty Dancing, Grey still does all her own moves.
Red Oaks premieres on Oct. 9 on Amazon
