EXCLUSIVE: Prime Video has opted not to renew YA drama Motorheads for a second season, Deadline has learned. The decision comes more than three months after the 10-episode first season dropped May 20.
But there is hope for the series’ passionate fans who have been campaigning for a renewal on X and TikTok. The producers — with Amazon‘s permission — have taken out the show, created by John A. Norris, and already started conversations with potential new homes, sources said.
“We set out to make a show with no agenda and a lot of heart, to give families something they can watch together,” series executive producer Jason Seagraves said in a statement to Deadline. “While Johnny and I are disappointed Motorheads won’t be continuing at Prime Video, we couldn’t be more proud of what the team created. Despite going into release with impossibly low audience awareness, our passionate and vocal fan base led the charge and made the series impossible to ignore. Their enthusiasm has energized us and we’re optimistic we’ll find a home that believes in and supports the show.”
Motorheads, starring Michael Cimino, Melissa Collazo, Ryan Phillippe and Nathalie Kelley, has shown staying power, remaining in Prime Video’s daily Top 10 shows in the U.S. until this day, reentering the Top 5 yesterday and currently at No. 7. It has been well reviewed (78% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes), and those who have sampled it, have stuck with it, which is very important to streamers.
“What I’ve been excited to see on that show in particular is we’ve got such great completion rates,” Amazon MGM Studios’ head of TV Vernon Sanders told Deadline last month. “So folks who start that show tend to watch it all the way through, and that’s a great sign.”
Further supporting the claim that viewers who watched Motorheads did indeed like it, the show’s audience Rotten Tomatoes score is a high 95%.
Those viewers’ overall numbers may not have been high enough for Prime Video. Motorheads never made Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 streaming rankings. On Luminate’s Top 50 weekly rankers for streaming series, it charted for five weeks, staying largely in the 40s and peaking at No. 19 with 3.29M hours viewed the week of May 23. The show did hold the No. 1 spot on Prime Video globally early on per FlixPatrol, which tracks the streamer’s top performers daily.
The Motorheads title — which does not scream teen romances set against the backdrop of street racing — could’ve been a barrier for female viewers who flocked in large numbers to Prime Video’s similarly themed Culpa film franchise. (Proving the two’s shared DNA, I hear Motorheads did well in Brazil where the Culpa films have been very popular.)
As the show’s official logline puts it, Motorheads is about first love, first heartbreak and turning the key in your very first car. It centers on teen twins Zac (Cimino) and Caitlyn (Collazo) who, along with their mother Samantha (Kelley), move to Pennsylvania to live with their uncle Logan (Phillippe), a former NASCAR driver-tuned-auto body shop owner.
In the same July interview, Sanders spoke about Amazon’s bet on Motorheads.
“We were just really wowed by the idea of the show. We were launching NASCAR this summer, and so having a show that actually spoke to fans of that genre [was an asset]. It was really just the characters. We feel like we lucked out getting into business with those showrunners as well,” he said. “Motorheads has just really sort of resonated with us and struck us … We’re quite proud of it.”
Motorheads is part of Amazon’s expansion in the YA space, capitalizing on the success of The Summer I Turned Pretty, Maxton Hall and the Culpa movies. Two other new YA series that launched in the past couple of months, Overcompensating and We Were Liars, look promising for renewal.
Unlike TSITP, Maxton Hall, Culpa and We Were Liars, Motorheads is an original idea and not based on bestselling books, which likely contributed to the low awareness leading to the premiere. It also did not get the same level of promotion as some of the other high-profile titles did.
As a result, the show was a slow build in finding an audience — which could explain why it is sticking around in the U.S. Top 10 as new viewers discover it. A wholesome coming-of-age series that the whole family can watch together, Motorheads has found a receptive audience in the middle of the country.
From writer-showrunner Norris, Motorheads, whose cast features four Latino leads, also stars Uriah Shelton, Drake Rodger, Johnna Dias-Watson, Audrey Gerthoffer, Nicolas Cantu, Josh Macqueen and Mia Healey. Matt Lanter and Sophia Esperanza recur.
The series has some unfinished business as the Season 1 finale ended with two major cliffhangers. A night street race between Zac (Cimino) and Harris (Macqueen) ended in a horrific crash as Harris’s car flipped multiple times and burst into flames, leaving his fate up in the air. And Caitlyn (Collazo) received a mysterious call from Spider Lake, Mich., possibly from her and Zac’s father whom they had never met. It was part of the series’ underlying mystery that will now potentially be left unsolved.
It is rare for streamers to allow their original series — especially when they are produced by the platform’s internal studio — to look for new homes post-cancellation, making Motorheads a rare exception.
From Amazon MGM Studios, Motorheads is executive produced by Norris, Seagraves, Jake Fuller, Dana Brunetti, Keegan Rosenberger and Jax Media. Neil Burger directed the pilot, and Ryan Zaragoza serves as co-executive producer and producing director.