In another time—not so long ago, really—Red Oaks would have been an indie film powerhouse, an 80s-set coming-of-age story from the guys who brought you Magic Mike and Pineapple Express.

But Red Oaks debuts this week instead as a 10-part series from Amazon, yet another chip in the wall that once separated TV from film. In an apocalyptic speech at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2013, Steven Soderbergh bemoaned the growing distance between actual cinema and the movie industry; now, as an executive producer of Red Oaks, he’s sort of making his own prediction come true. Red Oaks is, by Soderbergh’s definition, cinema: it comes from the vision of its two creators (Greg Jacobs and Joe Gangemi), bears the stamp of its many directors (David Gordon Green, Amy Heckerling, Hal Hartley), and as a mash-up of The Graduate’s melancholy and Caddyshack’s teen hijinks, has something to say. It’s not a movie, though. It’s not television. It’s Amazon.

Soderbergh calls himself a consigliere on Red Oaks—he claims to hate producing, though he’s credited as a producer on four projects this year alone—but it was his push that made the project exist to begin with. Soderbergh and Jacobs—Soderbergh’s first-assistant director on nearly everything since 1993’s King of the Hill, and director of this summer’s Magic Mike XXL—were on the Bedford-Stuyvesant set of The Knick when Jacobs started talking about his teenage experience working at a suburban country club. “I was like, you’ve gotta do something with that,” Soderbergh remembers. “It seems to me that’s a ready-made TV show.”

It might not have seemed that way even a few years earlier; before The Knick Soderbergh’s only major TV work was the Washington satire K Street, which he calls a “physically difficult” experience. But after HBO rescued Behind the Candelabra from that limbo between micro-budget indies and studio blockbusters, and after The Knick was so compelling it pulled Soderbergh out of a planned “retirement,” television became Soderbergh’s next frontier. In addition to Red Oaks and The Knick he’s executive producing a TV version of his 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience for Starz. Perhaps more importantly, “I’m really, really happy with the stuff that I’m getting to work on. That’s all that matters to me.”

Gage Golightly and Craig Roberts. Courtesy of Amazon.

Greg Jacobs teamed up with novelist Joe Gangemi to begin creating Red Oaks while The Knick was still in production; he’d run the set of the dark, bloody medical drama by day and, at night, dig into his memories of hooking up and smoking pot at country clubs. “We definitely reminisced a lot when we were writing,” says Gangemi, standing on the stifling-hot set of Red Oaks in late July. Set in the summer of 1985, the show stars Submarine’s Craig Roberts as David, a kid studying film at N.Y.U. but working as a tennis pro in the meantime, surrounded by a menagerie of friends, crushes, parents, and at least one potential nemesis.

David Gordon Green, who proved his own 80s nostalgia chops with The Sitter, directed the first two episodes of the series and came back in July for the finale. Standing outside the Pearl River, New York, home that acts as David’s house, Green said it was only in the third season of Eastbound & Down, the darkly comic HBO series he executive produced, that he began recognizing TV as a home for independent filmmakers. “The first season of Eastbound, we were still the weird kid in school,” Green recalls. “Then I started looking around at the climate of other stuff that’s popping up and people were taking chances. Now everybody’s allowed to get weird and it’s O.K.”