'The Runarounds': Topher (Jeremy Yun), Charlie (William Lipton) and Neil (Axel Ellis). Prime Video Logo text [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. Related Stories TV Streaming Ratings: 'Wednesday' and 'King of the Hill' Score Big Premieres TV 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' Unveils End-of-Season Trailer for Final Three Episodes Set in Paris 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 sen