With the return of his hit show American Chopper set for May, motorcycle designer Paul Teutul Sr. is expanding his television presence with a new show on CMT set to premiere later this year.
According to The Wrap, the show will be called Orange County Choppers, named after Teutul’s New York-based shop. The series will consist of eight hour-long, unscripted episodes and production will begin this summer.
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“We’re thrilled to be back on television doing what we do best: building outrageous custom motorcycles,” Teutul said in a statement. “We have a lot of very cool projects coming up and can’t wait to deliver on this new partnership with CMT and Pilgrim.”
Much like the American Chopper series, the show will follow Teutul and his co-workers as they design and build creative custom-made motorcycles.
“Pilgrim’s relationship with Paul Sr. goes back more than a decade, and we’ve seen his creative and mechanical genius first-hand,” Pilgrim Studios’ head and executive producer Craig Piligian said. “We’re so glad to be working with him again and look forward to bringing OCC’s unique brand of excitement and inspiration to CMT viewers.”
The original run of American Chopper ran for six seasons and 165 episodes, first on Discovery Channel then later on TLC. The show wrapped in 2010, where shortly after Teutul’s co-star and son Paul Teutul Jr. left the company and started up his own, Paul Jr. Designs. This led to a four-season spinoff series, American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior, that lasted for another two years.
The show returns in May, but had a sneak peek of its first episode air on Thursday. Despite their differences and fights over the years, the two Teutul’s ended the first episode agreeing to work together on restoring “The Yankee Bike,” a motorcycle they made on the show back in 2005 but had since been nearly destroyed.
“Someone like malous-ly destroyed this thing,” Teutul Jr. said when he brought in his dad to look at the bike at his shop.”What I had in mind was restoring it completely, but even more importantly I was hoping that maybe you and I could do this as a restoration project. I don’t know, just to try and have something to do together.”
“Yeah, I mean we could do it right here,” Senior said.
Teutul Jr. was overjoyed that he gets to work with his father again on something.
“For me it’s huge,” he said in a confessional. “The Yankees Bike in some way represents our relationship in how damaged our relationship has been. What an opportunity to actually physically repair this and at the same time hopefully begin to repair our relationship. And I think it’s something we really need. It’s something I need, I know that.”
