12 Best TV Shows Like Motorheads

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Amazon dropped the entire 10-episode first season of “Motorheads” on May 20, 2025 to the delight of car enthusiasts and young adult drama fans alike. It stars Ryan Phillippe as former NASCAR mechanic Logan Maddox, who takes in his sister-in-law, Samantha Torres (Nathalie Kelly), and her teenagers, Zac (Michael Cimino) and Caitlyn (Melissa Collazzo), when their father abandons them after stealing $12 million. The Torres family from Brooklyn joins Logan in the fading industrial town of Ironwood, Pennsylvania, which has a main street frozen in the 1950s and a thriving car culture. Caitlyn and Zac discover their father’s old yellow Dodge Charger rotting away in Logan’s garage and gather a team of friends to restore it to racing condition.

“Motorheads” is equal parts teen drama and soul salve for gearheads. There are plenty of familiar who’s-dating-who plotlines interspersed with the grimy garages and adrenaline-pumping street racing scenes, and the various filming locations across Ontario, Canada are perfect stand-ins for rust belt Pennsylvania. If you enjoyed bingeing “Motorheads” and you’re looking for something similar to consume, the following shows feature either elements of car culture or teenagers trying to learn about themselves and their families. Sadly, high-quality shows about car culture are rare. For that reason, we’ve included a couple of series that focus on youngsters involved in a more traditional form of competition — team sports.

The benchmark for sports-themed teen drama shows is arguably “Friday Night Lights,” an ode to Texas high school football that ran from 2006 to 2011. Kyle Chandler stars in the NBC series as Dillon High School head coach Eric Taylor, with Connie Britton and Aimeé Teegarden playing his wife. Tami, and his daughter, Julie. Taylor Kitsch and Derek Phillips provide a different family dynamic as brothers Tim and Billy Riggins, who are dealing with a family-shattering tragedy, much like Zac and Caitlyn Torres from “Motorheads.” “Friday Night Lights” earned 12 Emmy nominations and three wins, one in 2007 for casting, and two in 2011 for writing and for Chandler as best actor in a drama. That year, the show was also given special recognition by the Television Academy Honors, which “honors, celebrates, and recognizes programming that creates awareness, enlightens, educates and/or positively motivates audiences.”

There’s a lot of stuff that only adults notice in “Friday Night Lights,” and that cross-generational appeal is why it’s often mentioned on television “best-ever” lists, particularly when sports-themed shows are being discussed. It brought us many memorable lines, like “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” and Coach Taylor’s wise words from the pilot episode: “We will all at some time in our lives, fall. Life is so very fragile, we are all vulnerable, and we will all at some point in our lives, fall, we will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts, that what we have is special, that it can be taken from us, and that when it is taken from us, we will be tested.” The show’s 76 episodes have an average rating of 8.7 from IMDb viewers, with the series finale matching Season 4, Episode 5’s score of 9.6 as the best of the bunch.

If “Friday Night Lights” is the champion of scripted high school sports shows, “Titletown High” is its reality-based counterpart. The Netflix series begins with various testimonials about the importance of high school football in Valdosta, Georgia, including a newscaster proclaiming, “Valdosta is a place where it doesn’t matter so much how you play the game. What matters is whether you win.” The 2021 series goes well beyond the sidelines to show the lives of Valdosta Wildcats players as they juggle sports, school, and everyday teenage life. The Valdosta High School football team has a decorated history, having won six national championships and dozens of state and regional titles. With just nine episodes, you can binge “Titletown High” pretty quickly, and you probably will — once you get sucked in, it’s hard to take your eyes off it.

Director Jason Sciavicco told The Valdosta Daily Times how he managed to get access to the team. “We spoke with the school board and the superintendent and the athletic director, Coach [Rush] Propst, and did some early interviews with several different players and came to realize that, obviously, this could be a tremendous series for us.” Sciavicco previously produced the 2006 MTV series “Two-A-Days” about Propst’s former team in Hoover, Alabama, but he made it clear that the coach got no special treatment. “I think he would tell you there were things that he wishes we didn’t put in [‘Two-A-Days’], but my commitment to all the people that I work with is we’re going to tell a true, fair, balanced story and the subjects of our stories obviously control that.”

If you sneezed at the wrong moment, you might have missed “Drive,” a short-lived Fox series that co-creator Tim Minear described in a 2006 interview as follows: “A secret, illegal, underground road race can be anything from ‘Cannonball Run’ to ‘The Game’ to ‘North By Northwest’ to ‘Magnolia-on-wheels.’ Ours is all those things.” Despite the enticing premise and a cast featuring such talents as Nathan Fillion, Emma Stone, and Melanie Lynskey, only four of the six episodes produced made it to the air in 2007. That was a real shame, because it’s actually a great drama for car lovers.

Fillion leads the line as Alex Tulley, one of many people taking part in an illegal cross-country race sponsored by persons unknown. His wife has been kidnapped, and he believes she’ll be released if he wins. We learn more about the race as the plot develops, but the main attraction here are the automobiles. “There’s no point in pretending otherwise; the main reason “Drive” is so great is that it is almost entirely about cars,” said The Tufts Daily in a review at the time. “What makes the cars on “Drive” so notable is that they are not just fast cars; they are cars with personality that also happen to drive fast.”

Fans of the show, which enjoys a respectable rating of 7.6 on IMDb, are still mourning its loss today. “I loved this show and was very sad when it was cancelled,” wrote u/brainfr33z3 on Reddit, with u/kthanxie adding, “Really liked this when it was airing, and was blown away when FOX canceled it.” Viewers at the time were deprived of an ending, but all six episodes of “Drive” can be purchased on Amazon today. 

“Red Oaks” features more shiny European sedans than rusting American muscle cars, but this Amazon series that ran for three seasons from 2014 through 2017 has plenty of teen drama and a northeastern U.S. setting in common with “Motorheads.” It’s set in the mid-1980s at the fictional Red Oaks country club in New Jersey, where college student David Myers (Craig Roberts) is working for the summer as an assistant tennis pro. The cast is packed with recognizable faces: Richard Kind and Jennifer Grey play David’s parents Sam and Judy, and Paul Reiser, Gina Gershon, and Alexandra Socha are the Getty family: Country club owner Doug, his wife, Fay, and his daughter, Skye.

The tennis angle means “Red Oaks” fits the “Motorheads” template, a mixture of coming-of-age drama and competitive themes. Canadian actor Ennis Esmer shines in his first American TV role as a womanizing tennis pro named Nash. In 2017, Esmer shared with Parade the thrill he got from working with veteran Hollywood cast and crew members. “The whole job is a blast. It’s great. I’m working with Paul Reiser and Richard Kind,” he said, adding, “You hear people who worked on Martin Scorsese’s early movies. Steven Soderbergh would show up on set, and I’d forget my name.” On Rotten Tomatoes, the show enjoys ratings of 93% and 92% from critics and audience members, respectively, and the 26 episodes have an average rating of 7.9 on IMDb. It’s not the most sophisticated show on TV, but the brilliant cast of “Red Oaks” and the ’80s timeline make it a pleasantly nostalgic romp for Gen-Xers and older Millennials. This is one sports comedy hidden gem that Amazon Prime Video subscribers should binge ASAP.

NASCAR fans know the Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina as The Madhouse, and the 2010 History channel reality series “Madhouse” shone a spotlight on this storied venue with its famous quarter-mile track. It’s an inside look at the 2009 season in NASCAR’s Modified division. It subs the teen drama and illicit street racing of “Motorheads” for similar conflict between families and nationally sanctioned racing competition.

There’s clearly an element of embellishment to make the subject matter of “Madhouse” a little more TV friendly, but Bowman Gray Stadium is a compelling location with its tight racing surface that encircles a football field and binds a community. Winston-Salem is a much bigger place than Ironwood from “Motorheads,” but weekend racing at the Madhouse has a decidedly small-town feel. The pressure of high-stakes, dangerous racing creates plenty of conflict between and within the teams, making the 11 episodes of “Madhouse” recommended viewing for race fans.

In 2018, Mason Dunn of Bleacher Report outlined exactly what made the series special. “Bowman Gray is truly a track where anything can happen on any night. But the action on the track and in the pits isn’t the only reason why this show is as good as it is,” he wrote. “The show does an excellent job of showing the viewers who these drivers are off the track as well as showing the amount of work that the drivers and their teams go through every week in order to go racing on Saturday night.”

“Freaks and Geeks” is another series that deserved more than its brief one-season run in 1999 and 2000. Having struggled to find a time slot for it, NBC cancelled “Freaks and Geeks” after 18 episodes. The show’s ability to mix comedic and dramatic elements might have just been too far ahead of its time to be appreciated. It’s gained quite a cult following since, thanks in part to the later careers of stars James Franco, Seth Rogen, Linda Cardellini, Busy Philipps, Samm Levine, and Jason Segel. They’re all fresh-faced here and finding their feet as actors, but the performances stand up well.

Cardellini and John Francis Daley play siblings Lindsay and Sam Weir, who each hang with and drift among their own small circle of misfits throughout the series. It’s classic coming-of-age teen fare that ends with a shocking moment for Lindsay and tangible growth for many of her friends. “Freaks and Geeks” has an average episode rating of 8.8 at IMDb, and while there’s no racing to be had here, the 1980s suburban Michigan setting means there are plenty of ’70s muscle cars on screen for gearheads to drool over. The series has aged well on the whole, as have the actors (here’s what the cast of “Freaks and Geeks” looks like today).

The Kevin James-led sitcom “The Crew” trades displaced teenagers fixing a car to race in the street for the exploits of middle-aged NASCAR pit crew chief Kevin Gibson (James) and his team as they adjust to new owner Catherine Spencer (Jillian Mueller). Not entirely unlike youngsters adapting to a new school, Gibson and his older cohort must re-evaluate their ways in response to Catherine’s tech-forward approach to racing.

The show was canceled after its 10-episode debut season despite rumblings about “The Crew” Season 2 being in development, but you can stream the series on Netflix. The problems presented in “The Crew” and the strategies used to solve them aren’t as teen-centric as those in most shows on this list, but there are more laughs and clever stories than the show’s quick cancellation and Rotten Tomatoes score of 40% suggest.

“One Tree Hill” and “Motorheads” have a lot in common: A small-town setting, teenagers balancing the need to work together with romantic and athletic rivalries, and compelling performances from a multi-generational cast. It’s set in the fictional small town of Tree Hill, North Carolina and stars Chad Michael Murray and James Lafferty as half-brothers Lucas and Nathan Scott. In the WB/CW series, the Scott brothers’ on-the-court competition as basketball players takes center stage, with familiar romantic and coming-of-age storylines filling up the free narrative space.

Barbara Alyn Woods and Barry Corbin anchor the cast’s older generation as mom Deb Scott and coach Whitey Durham, and the series takes a several-year jump between Season 4 and Season 5 to show how the lives of the younger characters had diverged since high school ended. Nathan now uses a wheelchair and no longer has dreams of basketball stardom, Lucas is a writer who still frequents his hometown, and Brooke Davies (Sophia Bush) is a successful fashion industry CEO in New York. 

Brooke delivers the best lines of the series, including a poignant message in the finale: “If you had a friend you knew you’d never see again, what would you say? If you could do one last thing for someone you love, what would it be? Say it, do it, don’t wait. Nothing lasts forever.” That lesson alone is reason to watch “One Tree Hill,” but fans of “Motorheads” will also enjoy how the interconnecting friendships and romantic relationships between the main characters grow and evolve.

Our next recommendation for “Motorheads’ fans takes us to British Columbia; more specifically, an area locally known as Rust Valley, a place with a lot of scrapyards and a deep car culture. It takes place on property owned by classic car hoarder Mike Hall, who has accumulated hundreds of vehicles in various states of disrepair. Hall, his son Connor, and shop manager Avery Shoaf have the know-how to restore them all, but Mike needs to find a willing buyer for each car to fund the restorations. “Rust Valley Restorers” premiered in 2018 and the first 20 episodes are available to stream on Netflix, although streaming rights for the later seasons, once held by Amazon, appear to have expired, so those episodes aren’t currently available.

The younger generation here is represented by Connor Hall and Avery’s son Shafin, who are both well beyond the ages of the main characters in “Motorheads” and don’t bring any drama beyond normal father-son workplace conflict. Mike and Avery, on the other hand, bicker constantly over the prioritization and execution of their constant stream of projects, which include a 1926 Ford Model T, a 1955 La France fire truck, and a drag strip’s worth of ’60s and ’70s American muscle cars like the Dodge at the heart of “Motorheads.” If you want to see what it really looks like when you fix up a Charger similar to the one that belonged to Christian in “Motorheads,” you’ll definitely get a kick out of “Rust Valley Restorers.”

Like “Motorheads,” the British series “Zero Chill” is centered on two displaced teenagers adjusting to a new home. In “Zero Chill,” the main characters are twin 15-year old winter sports prodigies; Kayla MacBentley (Grace Beedie) is a figure skating star and her brother Mac (Dakota Taylor) has pro hockey dreams. The MacBentleys move from Canada to Europe so Mac can attend an elite junior hockey academy, and Kayla understandably feels like she has been dragged along at the cost of her existing on-ice partnership and lifelong friendships.

The series aired 10 episodes in 2021 and is available on Netflix in most countries, with a TV-G rating in the U.S. that makes it appropriate viewing for kids of any age. Mac and Kayla are in conflict with each other yet remain supportive, and their parents, Luke (Doug Rao) and Jenny (Sarah-Jane Potts), try their best to communicate with their teenaged kids. If you enjoy the wholesome parts of “Motorheads,” you’re bound to connect with “Zero Chill.”

The Apple TV+ series “Swagger” is based on the experiences of NBA star Kevin Durant as a young basketball phenom in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) feeder system. O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Isaiah R. Hill star as young hoop dreamers Ike Edwards and Jace Carson. The series leans heavily on the sports end of the story, showing how each decision made by these young athletes is a compromise between their immediate needs, those of their loved ones, and the prospect of more rewards in the future. 

There’s plenty of teen drama peppered throughout the 18 episodes, and Jackson shows that his breakout performance as his rapper dad Ice Cube in “Straight Outta Compton” was no fluke. In 2021, showrunner Reggie Rock Bythewood explained how the series zooms out from the court to show the complexities of teenage life. “It’s a basketball show that’s not really about basketball,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s about growing up in America.” In that respect, it’s very much like “Motorheads,” although Ike and Jace’s America is different from that of Zac and Caitlyn Torres.

“All American” uses a different plot device from “Motorheads” to establish its fish-out-of-water story, centering on Spencer James (Daniel Ezra), a high school football prospect who transfers from his South Central Los Angeles public school to one in Beverly Hills to try and improve his college scholarship chances. Taye Diggs stars as coach Billy Baker, who recruits Spencer to his school and welcomes his new star wide receiver into his home to help him meet residency requirements.

The eight-season series is loosely based on the life of former NFL linebacker Spencer Paysinger, who co-produces. In an interview with New England Sports Network, Paysinger said, “A lot of the stories are rooted in truth. Obviously to create a compelling CW show, we have to sort of bend the truth a little bit and take a digression from what originally happened, but for the most part a lot of the stories ring true.” In other words, there’s a healthy mix of sports drama and teen drama.