Greg Nichols:

Luke Matheny keeps getting pulled away. We are on a rented soundstage on the outskirts of Los Angeles’s Koreatown, sitting in director’s chairs in front of a television monitor. A woman standing nearby flips through script pages on a clipboard, and a few crew members mill around with practiced nonchalance. On the monitor is a live feed of four middle schoolers sitting at desks on the other side of a big prop wall. From this set, which looks like a museum piece — presidential portraits, American flag, the words monroe doctrine scrawled on a dusty blackboard — someone is hollering for Matheny, the 38-year-old director of Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street. “To be continued,” Matheny calls over his shoulder as his expansive snarl of dark hair disappears around the corner. I catch a brief glimpse of his pants on the monitor as he strides past the camera.

Gortimer, which debuted last year on Amazon to critical acclaim, is about a 13-year-old boy whose suburban street provides the backdrop for fantastical adventures with his two best friends. Matheny won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and hasn’t done children’s television before, but he says he fell in love with the show when he first read the pilot. “It felt like The Wonder Years, but with a supernatural element,” he tells me. Today, he’s shooting an episode in which Gortimer discovers a charmed blazer that makes others see and treat him as an adult. While Gortimer characteristically weighs the implications of his newfound power and hesitates to use it for his own gain, his mischievous best friend Ranger goes on a spree of lottery-ticket buying and R-rated-movie watching.