Series

[This story contains spoilers from The Runarounds season one.]

“There were times, even when I first started, where I was like, ‘Is this the story of the band that doesn’t make it?’” says The Runarounds creator Jonas Pate while discussing the making of his new Prime Video series. 

It wouldn’t be the first time Hollywood explored the breakout-to-breakup pipeline of the American rock band. Alongside documentary or dramatized looks at bands like The Doors, The Runaways or The Four Seasons there’s That Thing You Do, Daisy Jones and the Six, Almost Famous, Eddie and the Cruisers and more that have all charted the rise, the fall and the turbulence of the music industry. 

For Pate, The Runarounds wasn’t going to be that kind of story. “I felt like it might be more interesting if I didn’t have them go to the top instantly. You’re not going to be an overnight success. You’re gonna be one of those workhorse bands that keeps going, keeps writing great album after great album, and the fanbase will keep acknowledging it until the world has to,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. 

For the executive producer, bands like U2 that “have been friends since junior high” and the belief that being an artist is a “noble cliff jump” would instead inform his approach. “You’re sacrificing your youth with a group of other people, and your odds of succeeding is almost zero. But you’re so naive and full of hope about the whole thing,” he says. “It’s a real life-defining thing. I wanted to tell a very dramatic true story of that.” 

In some ways, The Runarounds is also a mirror of Pate’s journey in Hollywood. “I worked for a long time before I had a success, and I’d almost resigned myself to being grateful enough to work consistently, even though I never really had a big hit. It happened to me late in my career and by then, I had realized the thing I actually cared about was the process. If you become results-oriented all the time in Hollywood, you can drive yourself to misery.

“So if you realize that we’re doing this thing and it’s really about the joy — about the process — could I just tell that story?” he adds. “That they’re going to have an amazing time with each other, even if it doesn’t work? That art doesn’t need to be transactional, and you can just do it for its own sake? In a place like Hollywood, that’s super hard to remember. The culture is designed to get you to believe the other way.”

***

Ahead of the show’s Sept. 1 premiere, Pate is speaking about his new series over Zoom from Charleston, coming off of shooting the fifth and final season of his and brother Joshua’s YA drama Outer Banks. The Netflix series was filmed in the South Carolina city for three seasons as a stand-in for the real Outer Banks, which reside in Pate’s home state of North Carolina. 

That’s where the writer-director has set his new series The Runarounds, by way of Wilmington, a town of over 100,000 whose band scene he knows well and has served as the backdrop for teen dramas like Dawson’s Creek and The Summer I Turned Pretty. Like fellow YA shows, Pate wanted The Runarounds’ backdrop to say something about the teens who reside there. “I didn’t want the band to come out of a big urban center where they’re more aware of media culture and all that,” he continues. “These are just guys in their garage playing guitars, and I wanted it to feel that way.”

Pate’s choice gives the desired color to his coming-of-age tale about a tight-knit group of teens navigating their dreams alongside their complicated families and budding romances in a small-ish town. But thanks to several of the show’s other elements, including its casting approach and the band’s musical performances, it’s also an uncannily meta music drama that breaks tradition around what the rock band drama can do and be.  

Much of how the show subverts expectation is through its cast — Will Lipton, Zendé Murdock, Axel Ellis, Jesse Golliher, and Jeremy Yun — a group of twenty-somethings hailing from across the country who, since their casting, have become a real band amid an industry rock resurgence. “All of us have played music since a frighteningly early age,” Yun says. “It’s something we love. It’s in our DNA.”

Some of the members, like Lipton and Yun, had already played in bands together. Ellis’ band, Ax and the Hatchetmen, is currently signed to Arista Records, and has been touring and putting out music videos. Golliher had long-standing dreams of being a professional musician, while Zendé, whose father used to sub for Fishbone, says Pate, came from a musical dynasty. 

“Three of the guys are singing leads, and Jeremy can sing backup. They’re all multi-instrumental,” Pate explains. “When Zendé sent me his tape, he sent it to me on guitar. When I looked at it, his playing was super percussive, so I called him, and I’m like, ‘You don’t play drums, do you?’ and then he sent me a tape playing drums. I was like, ‘How did you not lead with that!’” 

They were connected through Pate’s casting call, which was amplified over social media by his Outer Banks cast and garnered 5,000 submissions for what was initially conceived as a four-piece band. “My wife [Jennifer Pate] and I just sat in bed and scrolled through videos. We’d be like, ‘We like this guitarist, we like this drummer,’” he recounts of those moments in 2021. “At first, I thought about who was most compelling — who did my eye go to — in those tapes? There was one, Jesse, he’s this really amazing songwriter, so it was then these are the five I liked the most.” 

“They were all like 17. We talked to their parents, tried to convince them that we weren’t just some insane, strange Hollywood people, and then flew them down to Charleston,” Pate adds. He gave the group a few Iggy Pop songs to learn, and set up instruments so they could play for him during lunch on the Outer Banks’ set. The quintet would be the first — and only — five to audition for the gig. 

“They’d literally met 15 minutes before, but they just melted the paint off the walls,” Pate excitedly recalls. “Their chemistry was bananas. I was like, ‘Could it be that this is it? We just picked five out of the ether and we’re done?’” 

***

While the group had instantaneous musical chemistry, only one — Lipton, who has appeared on General Hospital — had ever acted for the camera. So while Outer Banks and The Runarounds don’t share a universe, according to Pate, he put the band in a season three episode of the Netflix series, “just so these green high school kids weren’t freaked out when people started sticking cameras in their face,” he tells THR.

When The Runarounds began filming, the director and EP then brought in an acting coach and wrote the script to versions of the band members. “We would do these work sessions — almost like therapy sessions where I would say, ‘Tell me about your parents, tell me about your sister, tell me about why you want to do this.’ Then we built that into the storylines,” he says. 

On set of the pilot and series, which filmed in 2022 and 2024, respectively, Pate says he wanted to create an environment where “we’re just at play and having fun” and “it’s all about being connected to that interior spirit.” So he didn’t hold his young ensemble to the script, allowing the group to constantly ad-lib and they frequently shot with three cameras, “so if they didn’t do the same thing take-to-take, it was fine” — a trick he’d learned from Jeff Reiner, who, like Pate, directed on Friday Night Lights.  

Yun described the experience as both led with love and a well-oiled machine, with Golliher noting there were only a few times the cast had to be wrangled by Pate. “There’s people putting their time and energy into this art, so you have to show up and do the work, but the work is fun itself,” adds Lipton. 

Part of that fun came from how Jonas says he unburdened the cast from the technical aspects of filmmaking, and leaned harder into organic performance. Realness is something he built into other aspects of the music and YA drama, which was inspired by things like the Chapel Hill-born Merge and friend Jay Faires’ Mammoth record labels.

“I had a brother who went to Chapel Hill in the ’90s, and there was this amazing indie rock and roll scene happening. It was wildly competitive, where people were stealing drummers and bassists from each other. I was mesmerized by all of it. I knew all these stories and to me, it was dramatic, but I was worried that it wasn’t life and death, so it was going to be a tough pitch, the trials and tribulations of a high school rock band,” he tells THR. 

“There’s so much to not understand or know. What does the music sound like? There’s no hard plot,” he continues. “But when Outer Banks became a hit, which was super fortunate, I realized that now might be the chance to tell this story.” 

***

Despite the demand of the Outer Banks production schedule and due to his own trepidations about the pitch, Pate created a proof of concept to help distributors understand the concept, he says. He would secure funding from a friend to shoot the pilot “completely on spec, with the music and everything — a gigantic gamble on my friend’s part. I kept telling him, ‘You realize this investment can go to zero, like you can lose all this?’ But he was cool about it.”

The director’s real and working North Carolina film family would also show up in support of the project, including Pate’s brother and daughter, Lilah, who are credited on the series. “There’s a tight film community in Wilmington and Charleston, so it’s the same crew from Outer Banks, and two-thirds of the crew is related,” he says. “So it was easy to rally a bunch of people who were willing to jump in and help, and make [the pilot] as efficient as possible.”

Yet even with the funding and bodies, The Runarounds was still incredibly risky. “You’re really going in with these kids that have never acted, and if this thing fails, that’s going to be the reason, and it’s going to be a totally fair reason,” he says. “But I always wanted to get real musicians and hope they could act. I just felt like the mistakes and authenticity was the whole thing.

“We’re a bunch of young kids, and he put the fate of an entire TV show in the hands of us,” says Lipton. “There were some times when we had self-doubt, but the way that we communicated with one another, he kept on inspiring us. It’s so beautiful that a show like this that promotes authenticity had that element behind the scenes, too.” 

That authenticity would stretch beyond the set and screen. As Pate was building his drama, The Runarounds were molding themselves into young adults — and a real band. Like their characters, the ensemble has made big choices since graduating from high school, including whether to go or pass on college in the name of, or despite, their burgeoning careers. 

One band member says he “refused to get a job” to focus on his professional music career, while others headed to university to study subjects like music or economics at places like Princeton, USC or Columbia College Chicago, while scoring Daytime Emmy nominations, competing as a collegiate-level golfer, and even performing at Lollapalooza along the way. 

Collectively, the nearly half-decade since being cast has been about “honing in on the craft,” says Murdock. They have done multiple multicity tours and written upwards of 40 songs for use by the show but also, separately, as a band. Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison produced a live EP with the band, with a second live album recorded at Amazon Music’s live-streaming and production studio in Williamsburg this past June. 

“They started to do tour dates. They played The Troubadour in L.A. They played some festivals,” Pate says. “They put the time into actually getting good and becoming a real band, and the whole time they were getting older.”

***

Pate says he saw the band’s creative growth throughout the two weeks of filming the pilot. Once it wrapped, he took them and his proof of concept to Skydance and then Prime Video, who gave him a straight to series greenlight. The result is something that isn’t quite Almost Famous, Ladies & Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, Jonas or even The Monkees, whose 1966 series launched nearly 60 years ago with help from a casting call in entertainment trades like The Hollywood Reporter. 

Yet, much like The Monkees’ timeliness amid Beatlemania, The Runarounds arrives in a particularly opportune moment in music. One in which rock, which last dominated mainstream music charts in the early 2010s, is back on the rise as evidenced by the rebirth of indie sleaze and events like the When We Were Young Festival and this year’s three-city return of the Vans Warped Tour. “People are like, ‘Why are you doing a show about a rock band? Nobody cares about rock and roll,’” Pate says. “I’ve talked to label heads. The fastest growing music demographic right now is indie rock. It’s 100% making a comeback.”

The series portrays both the old and new ways of breaking into the industry, as evidenced when the band — who are managed by their own teen friends — are approached by a record label after releasing a colorful (and viral) video reminiscent of OK GO’s breakout 20 years ago. It’s a storyline Pate says was inspired by a $2 million record deal one of star Lilah Pate’s friends brokered for a classmate while they were all still teens in college. 

All of this is set within a universe of performances, hosted everywhere from backyards and a fair to a makeshift club and a larger theater. The result is a season one soundtrack that Pate argues doubles as a live record. “Amazon, who had just done Daisy Jones, kept waiting for us to pre-record the songs, but I was like, ‘No, what’s in the show is live. They’re not supposed to be perfect. They’re a high school band.’ That was a huge debate because it was just not the way they had done it,” the director says. 

Typically, productions record in studio and do playback on set with actors lip syncing. But for The Runarounds, the band played the “equivalent of three shows in a row easily on set any given day that we were shooting music,” according to music sound mixer Scott Steiner. So the show’s music team of four, with initial work from Stephen Price on the pilot, had to function almost “like a touring production company,” says band manager Alex Collier, with the team setting up and tearing down shows once they moved beyond the basic setup of the pilot. “We were adding a completely new department into the way a normal production works,” notes Music Playback Brandon Hackler. “It is putting up a rock concert and then being asked to move that in a second. ”

With a limited budget, the department leaned on Amplify Entertainment (Bohemian Rhapsody) to connect them with equipment partners, which included Mojo Tone, Shure, and Yamaha, for loans. Time crunches led the team of four — including production assistant Chaandmon Croft — to streamline the pilot process so other departments could quickly work with material amassed between takes that could start and restart from various points in a song. 

“We came up with a system that interconnected me and Mike Rayle, head of the sound department, and all the components that we needed to record — microphone, preamps and recorders,” says Steiner. Adds Hackler, “The amps were going through these [isolation cabinets] that were planted so far away that you couldn’t even hear them, so when you were on set, you would just hear the drummer playing and some vocals.”

A console with a mix pre-set by the department meant “you could just roll it out there with one cable and a power cord, and plug it in” says Steiner, while in-ear monitoring systems and high quality mics were hidden under long hair and within the drum kit, “as no high schooler is ever going to have that sort of system,” notes Collier. “Scott’s recording rig had a lot of redundancy, so that if something failed, it was always there to pick it back up.”

“I wanted it to be authentic because everyone assumes that they’re faking it, right?” says Pate of the decision to lean into on-set performances. “I just wanted to do everything I could to convey that this is real.”

*** 

Just as the live music was real, so was the songwriting, which was composed through a “symbiotic” process between Pate and the young band, who wrote songs with the help of lyricists like Madison Love, Matt Koma, and Dave Bassett. “At first, we were just shooting in the dark, coming up with whatever we gravitated towards. Sometimes, it would be really special that the script and the plot would gather around a song that we had already made, and then other times it was more for the show,” says Ellis. 

When Pate asked the band for a song about the emotional journey of graduation, the “next day, they handed me ‘Senior Year,’” he says. There were also songs that didn’t make the season, including one the band wrote for when Amanda (Kelley Pereira) comes out to Topher (Yun), that are still on the show’s official soundtrack. “We spent two entire months in L.A. finishing the bulk of the songs about six months before we were about to shoot. We were cranking out like two songs a day,” says Golliher.

Since then, Pate says the band has written more music, including a song for a potential season two, after meeting one of their musical inspirations Cage the Elephant. Cage may seem like an unlikely favorite for a group this young, but a quick YouTube search of The Runarounds live performances reveals covers of Jet and The Strokes — more bands less likely to get passed down directly by their parents.  

It’s yet another way the series speaks to the current music moment, with The Runarounds highlighting how modern music taste is shaped in a world where bands like Pavement have garnered a hit decades later via TikTok. “Three of the five were raised in very musical households, so they know everything from the 90s going back to the 60s,” says Pate. “But the way this generation works, because of Spotify and TikTok and the ease with which you can access music, the algorithm realizes what they’re listening to, and it also starts to offer older stuff.”

That’s reflected in both the series’ music supervision and the band’s sound, the latter of which will go on the road this fall as part of The Runarounds’ Minivan Tour. In terms of whether fans can expect to see the characters or actual people performing when they attend, both Pate and the group agree that real life is on stage. “You’re coming to see the band,” says Lipton. 

Still, Ellis and Murdock understand why the wires might get crossed. “The performances were very real, and I think that just carries on into real life live shows,” says Ellis. Murdock adds, “It’s really cool that you can come and see what you’ve been watching on your TV screen with your own eyes,” adds Murdock. “I feel a lot of people will come and want to watch it as if they’re coming to a show in the TV show, and I think that’s a really fun angle to look at it from.”

The Runarounds have also signed with AWAL, a division of Sony Music, and are already beginning work on a record unrelated to the show, set to release between now and a potential season two. As for the future of the series, the executive producer and creator sees a five season run with eight episodes each. The second season would follow them in a “super crappy van on the regional tour playing colleges and 200 capacity rooms” as they work to land a slot at a premium festival, before ending with them opening at Bonnaroo. 

A possible third season would see the band opening for a more established group on a European tour before the fourth finally sees them as “a headliner with 5,000 capacity rooms and all the pressures and issues with fame.” That includes “how fame exploits and magnifies whatever your weakness is because there’s no guard rails anymore,” Pate says. That fifth and final season would be the stadium tour, as The Runarounds have become the biggest band in the world. “The dream is can I legitimately take this all the way and feel like you actually were in the van with them,” says Pate. 

It’s a big vision and one that could easily be disrupted by any number of Hollywood-esque realities around a show starring a burgeoning ensemble and a real life band. But The Runarounds stars tell THR they can’t imagine not sticking it out, whether it’s because they “won’t forget their roots” with the show, says Ellis, that they’ve already made it five years, says Lipton, or that they’d still be young by the time they “completed this journey,” adds Murdock. 

“This is a band, and it has a sound that evolves, grows and changes as the people grow and change, too,” says Yun. “That’s a story that doesn’t have a defined end, so this’ll last as long as we last.”