The field for Amazon Video‘s third pilot competition has been set. The final entrant announced by the burgeoning web video platform is Red Oaks, a comedy produced by Hollywood heavyweight Steven Soderbergh and directed by Pineapple Express helmsman David Gordon Green.
Red Oaks will star Craig Roberts as a tennis-playing country club employee who is at a crossroads in his life. The series boasts an impressive supporting cast, with both Paul Reiser and Richard Kind set to appear. Writer Greg Jacobs is a frequent Soderbergh collaborator who most recently teamed up with the director for Behind the Candelabra.
“Greg Jacobs told me this idea on the set of Behind the Candelabra and I told him it was great and that he should start working on it immediately,” said Soderbergh in a press release. “Then, while we were on the set of The Knick he gave me the script he wrote with Joe Gangemi and I said, ‘This is ready to go, let’s find a director.’ We very quickly agreed to approach David because the humor was sharp without being mean, and we felt he would understand and appreciate that.”
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This will be the third time Amazon will use viewer feedback as a tool to decide which shows it will green-light and which ones it will discard. Red Oaks is promising, but it will have stiff competition. The first two pilots to be announced were Hand of God, an hour-long drama, and The Cosmopolitans, a dramedy starring Adam Brody and Chloe Sevigny. Cult favorite director Jay Chandrasekhar then joined the lineup with a comedy called Really, and Hysteria, a drama starring Mena Suvari, made it four. In its press release, Amazon did confirm that Red Oaks will be the final pilot in the competition.
There’s no arrival date set for the five pilots, and Amazon has also yet to release any of the four series it green-lit during its previous pilot competition. Several of those entries showed real promise, but I’ll wait to wait to see how they turn out before deciding how excited I should be about the next round of pilots.
