Like the quickly forgotten Panic before 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.
