Composer:
Chris BaconCast:
Freddie Highmore, Vera Farmiga, Max Thieriot, Olivia Cooke, Nestor Carbonell, Nicola Peltz, Mike Vogel, Kenny Johnson, Keegan Connor Tracy, Ian Tracey (more)VOD (1)
Seasons(5) / Episodes(50)
Plots(1)
A modern reimagining and contemporary prequel to the 1960 Hitchcock classic Psycho, the series follows the strange relationship between Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his overbearing mother Norma (Vera Farmiga). After the recent death of her husband, Norma moves to White Pine Bay, Oregon, with her son to start afresh running a motel business on the Pacific coast. It isn't long before the mother-son relationship becomes something of a community concern, but Norman and Norma both soon realise that White Pine Bay's citizens have many secrets of their own. (Universal Pictures UK)
(more)Reviews of this series by the user Quint (1)
Bates Motel (2013)
Bates Motel is a serial prequel to Psycho that looks at the teenage years of the psychopathic Norman Bates, more specifically, the life of his family from the moment he purchases the infamous motel and the happenings in the small town where it is located. Surprisingly, the character of Bates doesn't get much space in the first season and gets somewhat lost among the other characters. For some reason, the town where Bates lives is full of rapists, women traffickers, gangsters and drug dealers. Few people are normal here, so Bates usually doesn't seem so abnormal next to such a bunch. That wouldn’t be an issue, but the main problem is that the show doesn't really know where to jump first, and it's hammered by the excessive amount of drama that's been piling up around the central family from the very beginning. There are so many of these events, and they move so fast, that they get stale very quickly, and cease to shock and thrill. But they are not boring, and you take it with a grain of salt, it's actually a kind of a perverted variation on the Beverly Hills 90210 type of soap operas. In the later seasons, the series focuses more on Norman's psychological transformation, which brings with it a lot of amusingly absurd situations, teetering on the edge of black comedy.
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