Parents' Guide to Motorheads

Plenty of charming teens, gleaming cars, and soapy plotlines about romance and racing are the draw in this series set in a faded Rust Belt town. It's reminiscent of Riverdale (without the quirky darkness) and Gossip Girl (without the rich kids), and it goes down just as easily, with clear archetypes for everyone you meet on Motorheads. There's the snooty rich kid whose dad owns everything in town, his long-suffering girlfriend, and of course, our hero, the one who's going to take that girlfriend away from all that. There's also a Big Race, and a lot of smaller races in a town where kids make their bones by driving cool cars real fast.

Motorheads does freshen things up a bit by allowing its female characters agency: Caitlyn begs her uncle to teach her everything he knows about building and restoring cars, and her mom has her own history behind the wheel. The series' setting, in a town where auto manufacturing's rise and fall pulled the locals' fortunes along with it, is also a plus, enabling storylines about who has privilege and who doesn't in a milieu where many people struggle. But ultimately, the central conflict on this series is between good-looking young men who use cars to decide who's who in the pecking order. If gleaming chassis and clouds of exhaust punctuated by romantic longing appeal to you, Motorheads will too.