American Chopper
A father and son building theme bikes and screaming at each other in a Hudson Valley shop. American Chopper premiered on Discovery on March 31, 2003, made Orange County Choppers' Paul Teutul Sr. and Jr. famous, and nearly a decade after its 2009 blowup handed the internet its favorite argument template.
Paul Teutul Sr. built custom motorcycles as a sideline to his steel business, Orange County Ironworks, and founded Orange County Choppers in Rock Tavern, New York, in 1999, debuting the first bike, "True Blue," at that year's Daytona Biketoberfest. Discovery aired two pilots starting September 29, 2002, and the series proper on March 31, 2003, with Mike Rowe narrating. The formula was Senior (the mustache, the temper, the Merchant Marine past), Paul Jr. (the designer), and younger brother Mikey (the shop's custodian and webmaster) racing a deadline on a theme bike: the Fire Bike honoring the 343 FDNY firefighters killed on 9/11, with a rivet-like piece of World Trade Center steel welded to its tank; the Black Widow; the ten-foot Air Force bike styled after the F-22 Raptor and first shown in 2005.
The show ran on Discovery through October 2007 and moved to TLC that December with an 18-hour marathon, the first new TLC season following in January 2008; OCC opened a $12 million, 61,000-square-foot headquarters in Newburgh that April, there were two video games (2004 and 2005), and Comedy Central parodied it with American Body Shop in 2007. The fights were always part of it, and in September 2008 Senior fired Junior. Senior then exercised an option to buy Junior's 20 percent stake and sued to force the buyout; Junior won an appeal in December 2010 and counter-sued. TLC canceled the original series in February 2010 and brought the feud back that August as American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior, which ran until December 2012.
The argument everyone knows is the season-six premiere, "NHL Bike B2 Bomber Bike," aired April 9, 2009: Senior confronts Junior over his morning tardiness, it escalates into a shouting match, and Junior is fired by the episode's end. Screenshots of it became an exploitable comic in late 2011 and broke out on Twitter in March 2018, with Vice, USA Today, Slate, and Vox ("The American Chopper meme, explained") all covering it. OCC surrendered the Newburgh building to its lender in 2011 to avoid foreclosure while leasing part of it back, Discovery revived the show from 2018 to 2020, and in late 2020 the company decided to leave New York for Pinellas Park, Florida, where its new building opened in June 2021.
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