We've got three exclusive teasers from Bates Motel , the reimagining of Norman Bates' Psycho story coming to A&E in March. Executive producer Carlton Cuse talks about the show.
Freddie Highmore as young Norman in Bates Motel. Image courtesy of A&E.
O.G. Psycho.
When Carlton Cuse – one half of the Lost showrunning duo that became known by geeks as "Darlton" (Damon Lindelof being the other half) – was approached to reimagine the story of Psycho for television, he was, he said, "scared."
"I thought it was a tall order to try to follow in the footsteps of Hitchcock's movie," Cuse told me this week. "But I just had a bunch of ideas that I thought were really intriguing, and most of all I was really fascinated by the relationship between Norma and Norman. I was inspired by Christopher Nolan, who had taken the Batman franchise and wholly made it is own."
And so Bates Motel, which will premiere on A&E on March 18, was born under Cuse and Kerry Ehrin, a former Friday Night Lights writer, with whom Cuse said he experienced "instant chemistry, instant meshing." The pilot — set in the present — sets up the story of Norma (Vera Farmiga) and her high-school-aged son Norman (Freddie Highmore) Bates, who have moved to a seaside town to start over, and have bought a motel. You know the one.
"You know their inevitable fate," Cuse said. "But you're hoping against hope that that fate doesn't happen to them, because you kind of fall in love with them."
