A binge-able 'Red Oaks,' a live 'Undateable'

* RED OAKS. Friday, Amazon.

* UNDATEABLE. 8 p.m. Friday, NBC10.

The business model at NBC still works best when people watch shows when they're on, which is one reason the home of "Saturday Night Live" is so interested in live anything lately, from musicals to the possibly mistitled "Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris."

As "Undateable" returns for a third season tomorrow with a one-hour premiere, it's expanding last season's live-episode experiment to the whole season.

"Nobody gets it," executive producer Bill Lawrence said this summer, recounting a conversation he'd had with someone who wanted to come to the live show and wondered how long "your tapings usually last."

Lawrence, whose cast - including Chris D'Elia, Brent Morin and Ron Funches - is dominated by stand-up veterans, isn't worried about the actors handling the pressure of live TV, but doesn't want it to look too easy.

"I really liked that show 'Roc' [a 1991-94 comedy starring Charles S. Dutton], but they did one live season and they were such highly trained theater actors that their claim to fame was, 'You can't even tell it's live.' This one you can tell because nobody ever knows what these guys are going to say, and everybody panics."

A binge-able 'Red Oaks' 

There are advantages to seeing a show on Amazon that go beyond free shipping.

Some only became obvious as I binge-watched the first 10-episode season of "Red Oaks," which premieres on the streaming service tomorrow.

When I first saw the pilot - posted by Amazon last year to gauge interest - I wasn't convinced we needed another 1980s coming-of-age comedy, even one produced by Steven Soderbergh and co-starring '80s darling Jennifer Grey.

ABC's "The Goldbergs" succeeds where others have failed in part because of creator Adam F. Goldberg's passion for specificity: He mines the details of his Jenkintown boyhood at least as deeply as he does '80s pop culture.

"Red Oaks" stars Craig Roberts ("Submarine") as an NYU student working as a tennis instructor at a New Jersey country club to earn money to escape his parents and his father's plans for him. And its pilot felt more like an homage to John Hughes movies than anything new.

Maybe it was a little different that David, a dweeb off the tennis court, had a hot aerobics-instructor girlfriend, Karen (Gage Golightly), since that's a TV-comedy dynamic usually reserved for older dweebs, but it was hardly a selling point.

If Amazon were asking us, as a TV network would, to watch one half-hour episode a week, I wouldn't have made it to Week 2.

And I'd have missed something.

Because, derivative as it is from a distance, "Red Oaks" often redeems itself in close-ups.

Over time, Nash (Ennis Esmer), the club's playboy tennis pro and David's boss, gradually morphs from punchline to pitiful as we watch him struggle to assimilate with the men who regard themselves as masters of the universe. That he happens to be an Egyptian working in a predominantly Jewish country club adds an intriguing dynamic.

Paul Reiser, too, gets an interesting arc as Getty, the country-club president who sees enough in David to consider him worth tormenting. A Wall Street player who worries about the growing distance from his daughter Skye (Alexandra Socha), he offers our young hero a look at a future that may be no more enticing than the one being pushed by David's play-it-safe father, Sam (Richard Kind).

That Gina Gershon guest-stars in a relatively small role as Getty's wife only adds to the sense that casting mattered.

Grey plays David's restlessly married mother, Judy, whose story would likely have been different if the show had been made in 1985 instead of merely set there. Hers is one of the stories I'd be curious to see explored if "Red Oaks" gets a second season.

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