Amazon picks up Steven Soderbergh and Ben Watkins pilots, tells Whit Stillman to keep trying

By Sam Barsanti | October 7, 2014 | 1:51am

Aux Features TV

Amazon is well into its third season as an Internet-based TV network, and that means it’s time to start deciding which new pilots will live and which ones will die. As of right now, according to Deadline, it has chosen two new shows to go to series, with one more being sent back to its desk to try again. The lucky survivors are Ben Watkins’ Hand Of God and Steven Soderbergh’s Red Oaks. The former—which features one of the most theoretically awesome TV show premises of all time—is about Ron Perlman as a “hard-living, law-bending” judge who decides to go on a vigilante rampage after receiving instructions to do so from what he assumes is God. Red Oaks is a coming-of-age comedy set in 1985 that stars Submarine’s Craig Roberts as a kid working at a tennis club the summer before he goes to college. Jennifer Grey is in it too, and, hopefully, Roberts will avoid putting her in any corners.

Meanwhile, Amazon has asked The Cosmopolitans creator Whit Stillman to write some additional scripts before it makes a final decision on the show’s fate. Presumably, this means audiences liked the pilot enough for it to not get outright cancelled, but not enough to give it the jump to a full season order. According to this article we wrote back in April, The Cosmopolitans is about “a group of young Americans in Paris looking for love and friendship.” One young American is played by Chloë Sevigny, and another is The O.C.’s Adam Brody, but maybe Stillman can copy Red Oaks and pull in some Dirty Dancing-style nostalgia to get more viewers on board. Is Wayne Knight doing anything these days?