A young person leans back over a freeway overpass at night, headlights blurring behind them.

TORRANCE

Home got weird
while you were gone.

LOGLINE

When Emma moves home to Torrance, CA, after dropping out of college to care for her sick uncle, she tries to resurrect her defunct high school band, only to find that everyone around her has moved on. Growing up might mean choosing between who you keep going back to being and who you're becoming next.

FORMAT10 × 30 MINUTESGENRECOMEDYSETTINGCalifornia South Bay

SYNOPSIS

TORRANCE is about going home again and realizing home got weird while you were gone.

Emma is 22. She left Torrance with a plan: college, a marketing internship, a version of herself that made sense in a room full of college normies. The plan fell apart when Uncle Sammy got sick, and now she is back in her cold bedroom, working graphic design at the county sanitation department, and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. The answer she keeps arriving at, against her better judgment, is: reform the band.

Remind Them was Emma’s high school band. They played maybe fifteen shows. They broke up under circumstances nobody fully agrees on. At her first show back, a teenager named Jade walks up to Emma between sets and says, completely sincerely, "You guys changed my life." Something in her breaks loose. Emma has spent two years trying to turn into someone else. But the person she used to be is standing right here in this room, wearing a Turnstile shirt, and it turns out Emma kind of misses her.

Overhead mood reference of a young woman listening to music in bed. — Back in the old room.01

Four friends together in an In-N-Out booth, photographed with direct flash. — Friends / California02

SYNOPSIS

Reforming the band is harder than it sounds. Micah, her ex and the guitarist, is guarded in manners she did not fully understand when they were together. Margo, her best friend and bassist, says no for reasons she will not explain, and Emma knows better than to push. Benny, their drummer, says yes before Emma finishes the sentence. And the scene has kept moving without all of them.

Friendships are specific and real, the DIY chaos is physical and escalating, and Greg, Emma's boss at the sanitation department, fakes music knowledge in increasingly funny and elaborate ways. But underneath all of it: Sammy is sick, Emma is spiraling, and her friends are in more danger than they know. The scene that previously felt like the only community that made sense now has edges. Micah is carrying something he will not put down.

TORRANCE is about the pull of who you used to be. The scene gave everyone in it something specific and irreplaceable when nothing else did. Emma is not trying to live in the past. She is trying to figure out which parts of it she can carry forward and which ones she has to leave at the door.

Fans crowd-surfing and singing together at an outdoor punk show. — The people you
come back to.03

Two crowd-surfers lifted upside down by their friends at a packed show. — The scene / live04

CENTRAL CONFLICT

Growing up means choosing what to carry forward—and what to leave behind.

01 / THE BAND

A place to belong.

The reunion is starting to feel real. So are the fractures: Micah’s silence, Margo’s resistance, and a community that protects its own at a cost.

02 / THE JOB

A life that makes sense.

A promotion offers Emma an actual career and actual stability. Greg is kind. The future is comfortable. None of it is obviously wrong.

03 / SAMMY

Someone to stay for.

Her uncle knows what a life in music costs. As his illness advances, Emma has to decide what she wants while there’s still time to choose.

A crowd lifting a stage-diver at a hardcore show.

SETTING

TORRANCE

California / South Bay

Punk & Hardcore Scene
Present Day

A daytime house show with friends watching from the balcony and courtyard.

Friends with a shopping cart and skateboard on a sunny California street.

Three skaters sharing a sunny diner booth with boards and drinks.

A punk rehearsal room packed with amplifiers, instruments and gig posters.

MOOD & TONE

TORRANCE is more than a music show. It is a specific and funny look at the universal pull of who you used to be, using the hardcore scene as a representation for community, identity, and the fight for authenticity. The comparisons that feel right: Atlanta for its tonal range and faithfulness to specificity. Didi for the accuracy of its subcultural observation, though where Didi looked backward to understand the present, TORRANCE is rooted in the present and wrestles with what of the past is worth keeping. The Bear for controlled chaos in tight spaces. And underneath all of it: the real footage. Scowl in a Santa Cruz backyard, 2019. Fugazi's Guy Picciotto hanging upside down through a basketball hoop in a Philadelphia YWCA gym, 1988. It's Jackass energy in the first act and Sorry, Baby grief by the third. The comedy is physical and escalating and earns the dramatic gut-punches because it takes the world seriously.

Paper-edged guitarists surrounded by VHS tapes, a camcorder, a television, and worn analog textures.

CHARACTERS

01Emma

EMMA

22

Smart, funny, anxious in ways that she has turned into self-deprecatory humor, and trying not to feel like she ruined her own life. She did not ruin it. She paused it at the wrong moment, and the pause took on a shape she did not plan for. She carries a grief she has not named yet. The show is, in part, about her naming it.

Arc +

Arc: Learning that belonging is not somewhere you go back to. It is something you build.

Mood reference: a young guitarist practicing on a sofa.

02Micah

MICAH

23

Ex-boyfriend and guitarist. He stayed in Torrance when Emma left, and that staying did something to him. He is guarded and sometimes self-destructive in quiet ways that do not announce themselves. What happened with Karen is not something he talks about. His loyalty to the people he loves is the most reliable thing about him. He is also, in the right moment, very funny in a dry way that catches people off guard.

Arc +

Arc: Deciding the past is something he survived rather than something that defines him.

Mood reference: a musician in warm stage light.

03Margo

MARGO

24

Bassist and Emma's best friend. She has band-mom energy in the sense that she's always looking out for people in the scene and helping organize shows, but she is not gentle about any of it. She is impatient and emotionally guarded. Her mother taught her, through years of demonstration, that love comes with conditions. Margo is in the process of unlearning this.

Arc +

Arc: Figuring out who she is outside her mother's shadow.

04Benny

BENNY

23

Drummer. Relentless optimist. Weed delivery entrepreneur. He once broke his hand doing mosh moves alone in his bedroom, falling off the bed, and told everyone he hurt it at practice. There is a hole in the drywall in his house at head height with no explanation given. He is the show's primary physical comedy engine and also, in the episodes that need it, the most emotionally direct person in the room. He has excellent intentions, talent, and ideas that should not be executed.

Arc +

Arc: Finding out there is more to him than even he suspects.

CHARACTERS

Layered archival paper with metal clips, a worn red ticket, pencil cassette and star doodles, handwritten notes, and a tucked bedroom photograph.

Two musicians playing electric guitars, cut out from an unused reference photograph and placed on the paper archive.

UNCLE SAMMY40s+

Retired legend. Sick. Knows exactly what a life in music costs, which is why he is simultaneously the most encouraging person in Emma's corner and the most honest about what she would be giving up. He does not want Emma to do what he did because he loved it. He wants her to do it if and only if it is what she actually wants, and he knows the difference.

Arc: The show's emotional spine. He wants Emma to choose happiness. He is no longer certain those are the same thing.

GREG28+

Emma's boss at the sanitation department. He told Emma on her first day that he liked hardcore music and has been living with that lie ever since through increasingly intensive self-education. He now owns seven old band tees and four classic h/c records. He represents a life that is comfortable, kind, and not wrong. Just not hers. The show does not punish him for this.

Arc: The road not taken. Warm. A little sad. Ultimately okay.

KAREN50s+

Toxic influence dressed as scene nostalgia. Not a cartoon villain but someone who genuinely loved this thing once and then started consuming it. She has been a fixture in the scene since before most of the main cast was born. Her relationship with Micah when he was younger was not what it appeared. The show treats her with the accuracy the subject deserves. Based on a true story.

Arc: What the scene has been making excuses for, finally named.

ELLIOT23+

Vocalist in a rival hardcore band. His convictions are real, not performed, and they mask a fear that is equally real: he found belonging in this scene and every change in it feels like something being taken from him, just like in the outside world. He and Emma are the same problem from two different angles.

Arc: Mutual recognition builds into an unanticipated alliance.

JADE18+

She saw Remind Them play an early show when she was barely a teenager. She did not fully understand it, but something stuck. Since then, she has spent hours hunting down every grainy video and old recording online. That is how her generation falls in love: the live moment, then the obsessive hunt for every piece of it. She is the first person to tell Emma that Remind Them mattered. She is at the comeback show in the finale. The show does not underline what that means. It just puts her in the room.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN

EPISODES 01—05SELECT TO READ

01First Show Back+

Emma moves in with Uncle Sammy. The house is full of old show posters and the heaviness of a life well lived. He makes her a sandwich. Zero questions.

Micah texts: show tonight. She almost does not go. She goes. Benny appears. Benny spills something. Jade delivers her verdict.

First day at the sanitation department. Greg mentions hardcore in the same breath as the weather. Emma looks at him. She does not believe him.

The spark is lit. She wants to get the band back together. Nobody else does. Yet.

02
03Getting the Band Back Together+

Margo says no for two weeks. Benny has already sent the group text. Micah shows up to the first practice without agreeing to anything. The practice is in Benny's house, which has a hole in the drywall at precisely head height and no explanation.

Resurrection attempts, each funnier than the last: practices in Benny's trashed punk house, an unauthorized warm-up in an abandoned venue, a cul-de-sac show powered by a borrowed generator that ends with a neighbor named Phil standing in his driveway for the entire set without speaking to a single person and then going inside when it is over.

Greg shows up to a show in an outfit assembled from a thorough misreading of what hardcore people actually wear. He has a printout. He has opinions about the opener. Emma has to leave the room.

04The First Timer+

A standalone POV episode. A teenager who has never been to an actual hardcore show, practicing moshing alone in her bedroom with a YouTube tutorial, picking an outfit, changing it, changing it back, standing outside a venue feeling the bass through the wall before the doors open. This is Jade, attending an early Remind Them show from their high school days.

The main cast appears only at the edges. By the end of the episode, Jade is in the pit, and something has happened to her that she does not yet have words for.

05MySpace Era+

A time-jump episode structured around mini-DV house party cam footage: waiting around, hanging outside, the show, and then the cops. We see Remind Them, before the band started, at sixteen, completely uncertain of everything. After the show is broken up, they dash to a 7/11 on the corner. They all decide to start a band that night.

Present Day: Sammy finds Emma going through a box of old show flyers. He is looking for his reading glasses. He leaves to look somewhere else. Emma stays with the flyers for a long time after he is gone.

EPISODE BREAKDOWN

EPISODES 06—10SELECT TO READ

06Thirty Minutes Before+

A locked-location episode. The entire episode takes place backstage before the last Remind Them show, technically a friend's birthday party in a backyard. Nobody will call it a show.

Margo takes a call from Karen and will not say what it was about. Benny tapes his hands with focused, methodical care that takes six minutes and is completely at odds with everything else about him. Micah disappears for twenty minutes. Emma rewrites the set list four times.

The episode ends on the first note.

07The Scene Pushes Back+

Elliot, a mean, muscled vocalist, makes it known through channels that Emma's return is suspicious. He talks shit about them online, starts a beef. She left when it was convenient and came back when it suited her. His argument is not entirely wrong. What he cannot say out loud is that he found belonging in this scene, and the scene keeps changing, and Emma represents that change in a way he cannot name.

Emma goes to one of his shows. She gets in the pit. Elliot sees her from the stage. He acknowledges her afterward with a nod. It is not much. It is a start.

The promotion offer arrives. Greg delivers it in a folder and does not make eye contact.

08Holiday Show+

December. Benny's metalcore band plays a Christmas show at a bar that has given them just enough to cover gas money. Tinsel on everything. Someone has put a Santa hat on the kick drum. Nobody takes it off.

Benny's family does not know where he is tonight. Margo does not answer when her mother calls. Sammy shows up and sits in the back in a flannel Emma recognizes from a photo of him at twenty five. He looks tired. He stays for the whole set.

The episode is about what it means to find your people somewhere other than where you were born.

09What Karen Did+

Karen's controlling, predatory history with Micah slowly comes to light as Emma peels back lie after lie. The band's confrontation with her is a conversation in a cold parking lot. Nobody says the right thing. Margo cries in Benny's car on the way home. Benny says nothing, and that is exactly right.

That same night, the venue for their first real show back cancels at the last minute. Margo, still shaken from the parking lot, spends the next several hours racing across town trying to find a replacement. She calls in every favor. She begs. She almost cries in a pizza parlor. Somehow, she pulls it off.

The two plots run parallel. The comedy does not soften the drama. They sit next to each other.

That night, they played their first real show back. The room is packed. It is messy and loud and over in twenty minutes. Something clicks back into place.

10The Comeback Show+

The first show back was packed. Everyone wanted to be there. This is the second show. Nine people are in the room, including the bartender, who is being paid to be there. Jade is there. Phil from the cul-de-sac drove over without telling anyone and stood in the back. Greg is there in a shirt that is finally almost right. Sammy is there.

The set is not perfect. A monitor cuts out. Benny breaks a stick and plays the rest with one. Micah's tuning drifts by the end, and he gets pissed. None of it matters. They play like it is a stadium. They finish, and for a long moment, nobody moves. Margo pulls Emma into a hug without saying anything. Micah puts a hand on her shoulder. Benny is already laughing. That night, they pack up together, slow and tired and easy in a way they haven't been in years.

An hour after the show, someone's phone footage is posted online. By morning, it is everywhere. Emma wakes up to an email from a booking agent who offers them a national tour supporting a band she grew up listening to. The season ends on her face, reading it, still in bed, Sammy's coffee mug in her hand.

THEMES

A connected cutout collage of friends, a woman drawing, a laptop, desk objects, and a red vinyl record.

Nostalgia

Every character in the show carries a previous version of themselves: the person they were before young adulthood, when everything was enormous, and the music felt like proof. Nostalgia distorts judgment. It makes people do irrational things. But it is pointing to something real, and the show treats it with respect even as it dramatizes how chasing it can go wrong.

Belonging

The punk / hardcore scene is built on finding the people who get it, which makes it warm, tight, and vulnerable to people who use that language to control access. Karen is the show's most direct version of this. Elliot is the anxious version. The show treats it as comedy until it becomes something else, and earns that transition.

Gatekeeping

Scenes get handed down. Someone is always the figure who built something, and someone is always the kid who found it, and the health of the community depends on whether the older generation makes room. Uncle Sammy knows this. The show is about whether Emma's generation will do it right.

DIY Lifestyle

Not just a genre marker but an ethical position. You build it yourself, you do not wait for permission, you make it real through the act of making it. This is funny when Benny is running a generator in a cul-de-sac. It is serious when Emma is deciding whether to take the county job. The show means it both ways.

Growing Up

Sammy built his life in a scene with no retirement plan. Karen has been here so long that she has become the thing the scene needs to move past. A new generation is arriving with no knowledge of the history and no obligation to have it. None of these positions is simple. Getting older is not a failure. Refusing to make peace with it is.

WHY NOW

Hardcore is having a moment, driven by a new generation on social media discovering its authentic energy and ethos. Scowl went from a Santa Cruz backyard in 2019 to Warped Tour in 2025. Turnstile plays arenas now. They've got Grammys. Old heads have strong feelings about all of this. That tension is exactly where this show lives.
A huge part of the post-pandemic generation is asking the same question: which version of my life am I rebuilding? TORRANCE puts that question in a specific, loud, physical world and asks it with playfulness, levity, and heart.
Generational friction in subcultures is almost never dramatized honestly on TV. What does it mean when the scene that raised you starts to feel like a museum? What happens to the people who stayed and to those who left and came back?
There is nothing on television that lives in this world. South Bay hardcore, DIY house shows, the specific texture of being young and broke in coastal California. The show is made by people who came from inside this scene. That is not a marketing note. It is what makes the difference.

COMPARABLES

SERIES / HULU

HIGH FIDELITY

Music & relationships

A woman making sense of love, identity, and her past through music. The closest tonal reference for TORRANCE’s intimate, funny, emotionally candid perspective.

FILM / A24

MID90S

Scene & belonging

California subculture as a chosen family. A reference for the tactile, lived-in world of a scene, and the complicated pull of finding your people.

FILM / FOCUS FEATURES

DÌDI

Humor & specificity

Awkward humor, emotional honesty, and the small details of coming of age. A reference for observing a community from the inside and getting its texture right.

SERIES / HBO

EUPHORIA

Emotional intensity

An emotionally exposed ensemble navigating identity, friendship, and private pain. A reference for TORRANCE’s emotional stakes and subjective visual language.

FUTURE SEASONS

02

SEASON TWO

The Road

The tour offer becomes real. Outside Torrance, nobody knows who they used to be. Everything that felt stable starts moving. The people who aren’t on the road—Sammy among them—are felt in their absence.

03

SEASON THREE

The Record

A big label wants a record. What will they trade for legitimacy? The scene turns on something it built because it got bigger than anyone wanted. Ambition catches up with a band built on refusing it.

04+

SEASON FOUR & BEYOND

The Scene Grows Up

Can the community survive its own success and make room for what comes next? At twenty-six, is Emma still the right person to ask? Or is it Jade’s turn?

PRODUCTION

Conceptual Remind Them band release kit: a printed shirt, cassette, show flyers and stickers.

Soundtrack:

Real South Bay and national punk & hardcore bands involved from the beginning, not as cameos but as genuine creative partners. The music should feel like you could go see it live that weekend.

Interactive Marketing:

Treat Remind Them as a real band. Flyers, fake setlists, an online archive that predates the show. Guerrilla presence at festivals and shows before the premiere. The community finds the show, not the other way around.

Merchandising:

Remind Them has merch. People wear it at actual shows. The line between the world of the show and the outside world is porous on purpose.

Community:

The creative team came from within this scene, from the writers' room to music supervision to the extras to the venues themselves. This is a show made from the inside, and that should be legible in every frame.

TEAM

Sean Wang

Director

Sean Wang is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose debut feature, DÌDI (弟弟), premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, winning the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble. The film was subsequently released theatrically by Focus Features to widespread critical acclaim. His documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short Film in 2024. Known for his authentic storytelling, distinctive visual style, and nuanced portrayals of youth, identity, and family, Wang has emerged as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary American filmmaking.

Alex Bigman

EP

Alex Bigman is a Los Angeles-based film and television producer and musician whose career spans independent cinema, prestige television, and the underground music scene. Previously an executive at Red Wagon Entertainment and Le Grisbi, his television credits include HBO Max’s TOKYO VICE and FX’s THE PREMISE. His upcoming film projects include GHOST DIAMOND, directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese and starring Rami Malek, John David Washington, and SZA, and DEAD CALM: THE MOVIE!, a music-driven road trip comedy. As a musician, Bigman is the founding vocalist of Fight Fair (Triple Crown Records) and Ghost Spirit (Rise Records), bringing over two decades of experience in punk, hardcore, and independent music culture to his filmmaking.

TEAM

Joey Izzo

EP

Joey Izzo is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at the Cannes Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and San Francisco International Film Festival. Raised in California's hardcore and punk scene, Izzo brings a distinctly DIY sensibility and irreverent humor to his filmmaking. His latest short, I WAS THERE TOO, premiered at Aspen Shortsfest and was featured in a sold-out retrospective of his work at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. His short MY DAUGHTER'S BOYFRIEND has amassed over six million views on YouTube, while STEPSISTER was selected for Cannes' prestigious Cinéfondation competition. His distinctive storytelling blends underground music culture, experimental cinema, and darkly comedic narratives.

Madison Woodward

EP

Madison Woodward is a musician, cultural entrepreneur, and creative executive deeply rooted in the Southern California hardcore and independent music scenes. A founding member of the acclaimed hardcore band Fury and an organizer of Sound and Fury, one of the most influential hardcore festivals in the country, Woodward has played a key role in shaping contemporary underground music culture. He also serves as an executive at Brain Dead, the globally recognized lifestyle and apparel brand known for its intersection of music, art, fashion, and counterculture.

A crowded hardcore show, with a fan lifted above the audience.

IT WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT THE MUSIC.

“You guys
changed
my life.”

JADE, TO EMMA / EPISODE 01

Mood reference of a person beside a car under a California night sky.

TORRANCE

Back to cover.