Feed your ’80s Day-Glo appetite
If you want to Wang Chung tonight, you have a few options. You can strap on your Day-Glo fanny pack with ABC’s comedy The Goldbergs, a light and bright bit of 1980s nostalgia airing the new episode Deadheads.
If you’re into stranger things, keep obsessing about Stranger Things, Netflix’s otherworldly popculture exclamation point set in the decade of excess. (I know, it’s a long haul until season 2 starts streaming on Halloween.)
Or, saunter down a road less travelled, over to Red Oaks on Amazon Prime Canada.
The series releases its second season March 10, catching up with the rich members and misfit staff of the Red Oaks Country Club in suburban New Jersey. The year is 1986, and the teen angst is as tempting as a bowl of Smurf Berry Crunch Cereal.
All the conceits of a 1980s coming-of-age film are there: sex, drugs, sharply defined characters and even a body-swap episode in Season 1. But in Season 2, the show seems to be coming of age itself.
“I think we knew we could go deeper, because I think everybody knew (the characters) now,” creator Gregory Jacobs said at a meeting of the Television Critics Association last summer.
“So I think (co-creator Joe Gangemi) and I really felt like we could dig deeper, as far as sort of the emotion and characters, and put each of the characters sort of through their paces.”
Hence assistant tennis pro David Meyers (Craig Roberts) is forced to drop out of university and is dealing with his parents’ divorce. His silver lining is his girlfriend Skye (Alexandra Socha), the daughter of country club president Doug Getty (Paul Reiser).
“In this season, there’s less time spent in the club,” said Gangemi. “It’s still the heart and soul of the show. But we get to New York, we get to Paris, we have Atlantic City. We have a lot of different expanding of that kind of playing field.”
Jacobs added that although there’s no bodyswap episode, fans will still get some standout nostalgic flavour: “We have a road trip in sort of a classic kind of ’80s road-trip-movie episode, which I think is pretty fun.”
LOVE
Netflix’s amusing musing on imperfect love returns for its second season March 10.
The Judd Apatow comedy about the attraction between nice guy Gus (Paul Rust) and wild-child Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) picks up with the two facing their commitment issues and trying to set their lives on an even keel — including Mickey struggling with her sobriety. Netflix has already renewed the show for a third season.