‘Outer Banks’ creator put together a real band for new show ‘The Runarounds’ (exclusive)

It’s one thing to write a show about a teenage rock band. It’s something else entirely to create a real-life rock band and then … ask them to act. But that’s precisely what The Runarounds creator Jonas Pate did for his new Prime Video series.

Years ago, Pate — one of the creators of Netflix’s smash hit Outer Banks — had the idea to do a show about a teenage rock band. “But I knew that most times what happens is you get actors to play musicians and you fake the music,” Pate tells Entertainment Weekly. “I was like, ‘Let’s not do that. Let’s see if we can find who’s out there.'”

To find who was out there, Pate turned to Outer Banks stars Chase Stokes and Madelyn Cline for help. The actors put out a call for young musicians on social media. “We basically said, ‘We’re going to put a band in Outer Banks, send us your high school band,” Pate says. Spoiler alert: It worked. “We got 5,000 bands sent to us in a week.”

Slowly, they started to find the musicians that they liked and pieced together a brand-new band. They landed on William Lipton, Axel Ellis, Jeremy Yun, Zendé Murdock, and Jesse Golliher. “They were still in high school,” Pate says. And yes, he did put them on Outer Banks. “I was thinking that these kids are going to freak out if they’ve never had cameras in their face before,” he continues. “They were just normal kids, so I did put them in a scene.”

But in the years since they formed the band — they originally shot the pilot for The Runarounds in 2022 — they’ve been making music. “They’ve actually become a band. They’ve written tons of songs. They just played their first festival in Charlotte,” Pate says. “They’re out of high school now and they’re totally legit musically. It’s awesome.”

And now, EW has the exclusive first look at The Runarounds, a fictional story that is sort of based on a real band? “Because the kids weren’t actors when we started, we would sit down with them and kind of have these therapy sessions: ‘Tell us about your life. Who are your parents? What do you like?’ And we tried to write characters inspired by their real-life stories,” Pate says.

With a little help from an acting coach, they were able to make The Runarounds, which follows a group of young adults post-high school graduation as they try to embark on a music career in Wilmington, N.C. Needless to say, things get pretty meta. “The debates of the show — should we go to college or be in a band? That’s the real debate, the actual choices that they’ve had,” Pate says.

Alongside the band, the series stars Lilah Pate, Kelley Pereira, Brooklyn Decker, Maximo Salas, Marley Aliah, Hayes MacArthur, Mark Wystrach, and Shea Pritchard in a story that Pate feels could have a big future. “We have a whole architecture for five-plus seasons mapped out that tells the story of what happens to them,” he says.

That story starts with graduation, as the musicians have to make the first of many difficult decisions: Do you pursue your dream of being a rock star or do you go to college? Thankfully, they don’t really have to decide until after summer vacation.

“They graduate, they get a new member, suddenly they seem like they’re not terrible,” Pate says of the beginning of the story. “They start playing house parties and small gigs, and over the course of the summer, they eventually have kind of a little bit of a viral thing happen to them.”

As Pate puts it, the show is, essentially, “the story of what happens to these guys” and the people in their orbit. It’s a story many young musicians can relate to and one that Pate has wanted to tell for a while.

“There’s this amazing artistic community that a lot of us are a part of in the Carolinas, where it’s a group of filmmakers and musicians,” he says. “One of the guys is Greg Humphreys, who was in a great band called Dillon Fence. And the guy had more talent than anyone I had ever seen when I was young. Dillon Fence did get a record deal, but they were a little bit kind of jangly pop. And right as they came out, grunge hit. And so they were just sort of out of step. I was like ‘Life is so unfair. This guy deserves to win.’ And that was the beginning of it. That’s how it started.”

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Whether The Runarounds will have a similar story — in the show or in real life — is yet to be seen, but the series is hoping to captivate audiences when it hits Prime Video in the fall.