[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkn5aEadrX4]
On Christmas Day my sisters and I went to see Les Miserables and cried like the wusses we are. But before we were reduced to tears we got our first look at the upcoming Bates Motel series which premier’s on A&E in March 2013.
Serial killers, it seems, are the ‘it’ thing now. Bates Motel will be joining previous serial killer-centric shows Dexter (on Showtime) which just ended it’s seventh season and FX’s American Horror Story: Asylum which focuses primarily on two generations of serial killers called Bloody Face as well as a handful of other killers, and police procedural’s like Criminal Minds, the Mentalist, Luther, CSI, Bones, and others that frequently feature serial killers. It will also be competing against a couple newcomers in the genre: Fox’s the Following and NBC’s Hannibal.
Unlike Hannibal which is heralded as a direct prequel to the movies, Bates Motel is a modern re-imagining of the Psycho franchise. The show is set in the present day and follows a teenage Norman Bates and his mother as they first take over the motel. From the featurette before Les Miserables it was hard to tell just what was going on in the show. The town itself apparently has a number of shady characters and secrets. Meanwhile Norma and Norman Bates are taking over the hotel, someone appears to kill someone, and Norman is trying to live some sort of normal life as a regular high school student. It doesn’t entirely allude to whether or not he’s the murderous psychopath he is in the movies but it hints at it. Plus, you know, it’s called Bates Motel.
And we all know where it’s going in the end.
That said, Freddie Highmore looks like he’s going to be an awesome young Norman. I don’t think he has done much recently – his last credit was a sort of indie style movie called the Art of Getting By which was actually kind of cute – and he’s been doing a lot of voice work in the past few years. So it’ll be nice to see him acting on screen again. Plus it’s his first time on the small screen since 2002 and the first time in the United States.
Keep an eye out for this one in March. We’ll keep you updated once we get a release date!
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