Teen band plays up growing pains

'The Runarounds' blends fact and fiction in a coming-of-age look at a rock group.

- ROBERT LLOYD TELEVISION CRITIC

JACKSON LEE DAVIS Prime MEMBERS of the Runarounds include Bez (Zendé Murdock), left, Wyatt (Jesse Golliher), Charlie (William Lipton), Neil (Axel Ellis) and Topher (Jeremy Yun).

Hey, hey, they’re the Runarounds, the latest Pino-echio band to straddle the line between fiction and fact.

Meet Charlie (William Lipton), guitar! He’s a romantic! Neil (Axel Ellis), also guitar! Not just a pothead! (He reads Ferlinghetti.) Topher (Jeremy Yun), lead guitar! The quiet one! Wyatt (Jesse Golliher), bass! The even quieter one! And Bez (Zendé Murdock), drums, replacing Pete (Maximo Salas), henceforth the “manager,” who surely has been named for Pete Best, or I will eat my Beatles fan club card.

They have been assembled for your fist-pumping adulation from a reported 5,000-plus hopefuls responding to an open call for musicians and dropped into the center of a teenage musical soap opera, also called "The Runarounds," premiering Monday on Prime Video.

This rockin' concoction comes to you courtesy of Jonas Pate, creator of the Netflix teenage treasurehunt series "Outer Banks," and like that show, it is a wish-fulfilling fantasy set in Pate's native North Carolina, specifically the seaside city of Wilmington, which offers a lot of lovely scenery and adorable domestic architecture. And like that show, it is all about being young and wanting to be free, like the bluebirds.

Unlike that show, everybody here keeps their shirts on, in the actual sense (though not at all in the metaphorical).