As a rule of thumb, you can tell how desperately a series is appealing to teens by how many Top 40 hits it jams into each episode. Using this, very specific, metric we can determine that Motorheads is the thirstiest show of the year. The creators know the audience they want and appeal to them relentlessly. It’s a program for the youth featuring one of their favorite things: restoring and racing vintage cars (citation needed on this claim).
Motorheads is the brainchild of John A. Norris, a producer on former YA hits like One Tree Hill and All-American. The series follows siblings Zac and Caitlyn (Michael Cimino and Melissa Collazo, respectively) as they move with their mother back to her hometown of Ironwood. There they meet mechanic and wannabe-biker Curtis (Uriah Shelton) and nerdy neighbor Marcel (Nicolas Cantu). With the help of their uncle Logan (Ryan Phillippe), the kids band together to beat the resident bully in a street car race. There’s also plenty of your usual teen drama along the way.
The town of Ironwood is your typical dying Rust Belt community with very little going on. That makes it at least somewhat plausible that there is a thriving racing circuit among the kids that no adult seems to know or cares about. It ends up being the best kept secret in town. Motorheads fills its episodes with every cliche of the genre. Love triangles, drunken parents, and criminal relatives are all present and accounted for. Even the mystery of Zac and Caitlyn’s father, who disappeared 17 years ago, feels reminiscent of other successful series like Outer Banks.
Where the show succeeds is in the chemistry between its young cast. While they’re often saddled with bad dialogue and clunky exposition, the kids are at their best during the quiet moments. When the program is content to just let the characters hang out and be themselves, it really shines. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of story to get through and those down moments are rare.
You’ve probably seen plenty of shows that look and feel like Motorheads. There’s nothing here that is reinventing the wheel. As long as it keeps spinning, series like this are happy to ride it out. 5 years ago, this would have been in a Primetime slot on The CW. Now, it sits on Prime waiting for you to take the plunge. Whether that’s better is up for debate. Either way, I don’t recommend it, even for the teens.
Motorheads is currently streaming on Prime Video.