The Runarounds Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
When “Outer Banks” creator Jonas Pate had an open casting call for a band to appear in the third season of the Netflix series, The Runarounds auditioned for him. The group earned the gig, and Pate began forming a concept for a new show inspired by the band. Prime Video‘s new musical teen drama, “The Runarounds,” follows 18-year-old Charlie Cooper (William Lipton), an aspiring musician, who, following his high school graduation, decides to get serious about taking his band to the next level. However, with summer slipping away, the pressures of attending college and adulting begin to suffocate him. Though the music in the show is good enough, the rest of the show is so egregiously terrible that it would have been better off left in Pate’s drafts.
“The Runarounds” opens in what’s supposed to be present-day Wilmington, North Carolina. One week before graduation, Charlie is determined to make it in the music business or be forced to attend college in the fall. The only issue is that his band is falling apart. His friend Neil (Axel Ellis) isn’t really enthusiastic about much. Topher (Jeremy Yun), the lead guitarist, is focused on attending Princeton in the fall, and Pete (Maximo Salis), the drummer, is a grade-A fuck-up, who can’t even be bothered to get to practice on time. Seeing his lifelong dream rapidly slipping away from him, Charlie takes charge. He ousts Pete – and tasks him with the role as manager. He also renames the group and takes on two new members, a talented drummer named Bez (Zendé Murdock) and another guitarist, Wyatt (Jesse Golliher).
Across eight hour-long, excruciating episodes filled with more songs and voiceover narration than dialogue and plot, the band has all of the generic mishaps and setbacks seen a million times in narratives like this one. Another bizarre element of the series is that it doesn’t feel grounded in any particular time or moment. Without the usage of iPhones or mentions of social media, the show could have also been set in the ’90s or early 2000s, which makes it feel even further away from reality than it already is.
Other baffling plot points include Charlie’s borderline harassment of Sophia (Lilah Pate, the creator’s daughter), the girl he’s had a crush on forever, his father’s willingness to let his family go through a foreclosure because he refuses to work, a random paternity revelation and Wyatt’s horrendous run-ins with his obviously mentally unwell mother. These arcs thrown into the story feel like added chaos instead of being used as actual narrative devices or for character development. Looking at the series as a whole, the show is littered with random characters and events that don’t contribute to the story.
To be fair, The Runarounds are playing versions of themselves; they are musicians and not actors, and that’s quite clear here. However, the painfully dull and warmed-over storylines don’t help. The show is so disjointed that Charlie’s narration has to come in to piece things together for the audience. Additionally, while YA-centered series often discuss tumultuous parental relationships, the adults here are as helpless as the teens. Not only are most of the band members parentified due to their incompetent caregivers, but it also seems that no one in the writers’ room has ever spoken with a teenager or a parent before.
“The Runarounds” doesn’t work. It offers nothing new to the YA genre, and its jumbled nature makes it unlikely that viewers will make it past the pilot, let alone the whole eight episodes of the season. A feature-length documentary about the musicians’ actual lives might have been interesting and more authentic. But, this fictionalized version of The Runarounds’ rise is probably one of the worst things on television. The characters aren’t fully formed, and the dialogue is bewildering. Despite the evident joy the band has on the stage, it doesn’t translate when they put down their instruments.
