Bates Motel

Pilot: Very satisfied. The best thing are the two stars, Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore are brilliant in the roles of Norman and Norma. If the psychology of the characters doesn’t stay in the banal “as a child, Norman was oppressed by an authoritarian and over-protective mother and that’s why he went mad”, I have nothing to worry about from this series. (19.03.2013)

Perhaps no other TV series has concentrated all the strong and weak points of American production like Bates Motel. From every frame, you can feel a high level of professionalism and an effort to make a hit, the selection of actors is careful and successful, the plot is attractive, and it is also a safe bet due to the popularity of Hitchcock's Psycho. However, in the end, it uncomfortably drags on. Close to our home, we have a pond that the owner uses for commercial fishing. He serves everything to the customers right under their noses, and in the densely stocked pond, everyone effortlessly finds their fish in the end. Bates Motel works similarly. In the desire for commercial success, the series has widely spread out, developing three storylines that deserve their own shows. One of them focuses on young Norman and his developing mental illness, the second focuses on the lives of local teenagers, and the third, for me the most enticing one, follows the rivalry between two local gangs over control of the marijuana cultivation industry, which supports the local economy. In the midst of all this, Norman's family makes twists and turns. These mentioned storylines sometimes intertwine successfully, but much more often they clash with each other. From an acting perspective, the excellent Vera Farmiga succumbed to the temptation and, as a co-producer of the series, steered her character from an unsympathetic dominant, and manipulative bitch, to an unfortunate and self-sacrificing loving mother, somehow forgetting that the former position is more appealing to viewers. The series comes up with a lot of attractive characters and motifs, but it doesn't know how to work with them. In the first season, there are indeed polished scenes - the episode The Man in Number 9 is more Hitchcockian than anything from the master's workshop - but with the increasing number of episodes, the screenwriter's helplessness becomes increasingly apparent. In a provincial American town, the number of murders is greater than in Detroit. The show is strangely scattered in terms of time and space, mixing anachronistic fashion and objects from different eras, and the outdated Bates Motel from Hitchcock's film looks somehow inappropriate in the era of digital technologies and the turbulent American teenagers of the present. I devoured the first season, the second started to bother me, and I only managed to watch the last three episodes with gritted teeth. I never mustered the courage to watch the third season. In hindsight, I realize that Bates Motel is freeloading on Hitchcock's legacy rather than developing it. Overall impression of both seasons: 55%. (09.10.2015)

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. (31.07.2013)