Like the quickly forgottenPanicbefore it, Motorheads, Amazon’s latest 10-episode attempt at a teen soap, takes as a given an improbable premise – in this case, that a group of American teens in Ironwood, Pennsylvania, a fictional town an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh, are primarily preoccupied not with the internet or football or parties, but with building and racing cars.
Cars are, of course, a pivotal part of many an American coming of age; routine drag-racing, not so much. The idea of Fast & Furious as odd local tradition, instead of a bunch of teens raised on the Fast & Furious movies, is the most charming, if far-fetched and unexplained, aspect of Motorheads, which you can easily imagine being pitched as Dom Toretto & Co but make it gen Z kids in a dead-end Rust belt town. Created by John A Norris, Motorheads has the clear imprimatur of the mega-corporation’s streaming wing: a checklist of genre parts cobbled together into an ungainly product that seems both cheap and expensive at once. The pilot contained more Top 40 hits than I’ve ever heard on a TV show, including assumedly pricey tracks by Olivia Rodrigo, Benson Boone, Teddy Swims and more; the characters discuss “winter break” while the trees remains leafy and green.
Motorheads is at least self-aware that it’s not reinventing the teen soap wheel, coasting on the expected elements. New kid in town throwing a wrench in the social order? That would be twins Zac (Michael Cimino) and Caitlyn (Melissa Collazo), who have moved back to their mother Sam’s (Nathalie Kelley) hometown from Brooklyn, for reasons unknown, to live with their uncle Logan (Ryan Phillippe), a former Nascar mechanic who has retreated to his small auto-repair business. Unresolved daddy issues? The twins’ father, Christian Maddox, was a legendary driver who disappeared 17 years ago following a post-robbery car chase that became a viral YouTube video played in the series on loop. (Christian is played in flashback by Phillippe’s son Deacon, who looks far too young to be a father of twins, let alone a local legend.) Rich kid villain who is secretly overcompensating for deep insecurities? That would be Harris (Josh Macqueen), the son of a local magnate and reigning car champion, who drives a Porsche and boasts a near permanent sneer.
Love triangle? Not one but two: Zac is immediately smitten with Harris’s Sandy-esque girlfriend, Alicia (Mia Healey), Caitlyn with closeted cool girl Kiara (Johnna Dias-Watson) and angsty loner Curtis (Uriah Shelton), who happens to be a motorcycle enthusiast. Ludicrously high and continuously escalating stakes? All of the parents, who apparently all had their kids during senior year, get tangled in another car chase crime operation that invariably ties into Zac and Harris’s ultimate drag race showdown. Also, there’s a diner.
“That’s literally every high school,” jokes one parent when a fellow parent/ex-lover remarks how crazy it is that their sons are fighting over the same girl. True, though some make the ingredients pop more than others; The Summer I Turned Pretty, by far Amazon’s most successful entry into the YA market, turns similarly incestuous and ridiculous drama into compulsively watchable television befitting the legacy of such soaps as One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl. Motorheads, by contrast, repeatedly sputters through laughably bad lines (“Tell your lesbo sister to stay away from my girlfriend!”), even clunkier exposition (“I mean, your dad just lost her,” Alicia reminds Harris of his dead mother) and mediocre effects (an obviously CGI-ed bird omen, for one). Car race scenes that should get pulses racing instead drag, failing to pull focus from the inevitable second screen.
The extent that the show works is credit to a winsome cast of new faces, particularly Cimino, Collazo, Shelton and Nicolas Cantu as archetypical nerd Marcel. While the elder Phillippe seems to strain for Logan’s World-weary, burned-out father figure, the kids’ chemistry feels natural, the show at its easiest and most enjoyable when it allows the foursome space to tease, bicker, hang out and toss around mechanical jargon while fixing up Christian’s old car.
The group provide a sweet heartbeat for the series – faint, but enough for this viewer to power through the 10 overlong episodes that land in unsatisfying territory, anticipating a second season that, given the streaming services’ capriciousness with renewals, I fear will never come. Which is a shame, as Motorheads has potential – there’s some good parts in an ever-reliable engine, but this arrangement stalls.
Motorheads is available now on Amazon Prime Video