What’s intermittently electric about Bates Motel is that Norma and Norman don’t. In fact, she’s a wounded animal, as dangerous as she is desperate, and clutching Norman tighter will only plunge him deeper into madness. “There are ax murderers and whores stuffed under every rug, so your kids better read up on it and get educated, because that’s what life is!” Farmiga delights in the high camp without losing sight of the fact that Norma, besieged by violent men, tries to protect her son, and herself, by pretending she’s in control. “Welcome to the world, ladies!” she inveighs against a proposed book ban. In the season premiere, her blond hair, blue eyes, and gray suit recall the chilly heroines of Hitchcock’s heyday, but the prickly jeremiad she unleashes at a city council meeting is anything but Kim Novak demure. Indeed, much of the credit for the show’s kooky appeal falls solely to Farmiga. Bates Motel unsuccessfully tackles this problem-heightened by the iconic status of Hitchcock’s classic-with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to storytelling that drags the focus away from the one relationship worth watching. Hewing too close risks unfriendly comparisons, while straying too far suggests an empty premise, concocted to capitalize on the moneymaking potential of preexisting material. The dilemma facing any prequel, sequel, reboot, or spinoff is in determining how near the original to plant its flag. For long stretches, it’s easy to dismiss Bates Motel as just another teen melodrama, lazily introducing twists to juice up the narrative and then allowing each one to peter out unfulfilled. It’s deadly boring and performed with only passing interest, all the more ordinary for trading in such lurid currency. His classmate and onetime lover, Bradley (Nicola Peltz), sets out to exact revenge for her father’s murder Emma (Olivia Cooke) gets stoned on a pot cupcake and Norma’s brother, Caleb (Kenny Johnson), arrives unexpectedly. Four months after Norman blacked out in his English teacher’s house and she turned up dead, it’s summer on the Pacific and business at the Bates Motel is booming. Season two picks up a few of these threads and tosses in a fistful of additional wrinkles. Doesn’t your hometown hang its burning corpses in the main square? In the first season, which transported the Bates family from the midcentury California of the source material to the fictional present-day hamlet of White Pine Bay, Oregon, Norma and Norman purchased the motel, began renovations-and, oh yeah, found themselves embroiled in the shady dealings of sex traffickers and drug kingpins.
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Part family drama and part village potboiler, sprinkled with funky Hitchcockian nostalgia, the series is littered with discarded subplots.
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Like the famed movie villain it reimagines, however, Bates Motel suffers from a split personality. Though nothing here matches last season’s skin-crawling “Ocean View,” in which a wrathful Norma repeatedly screamed, “You went out and you got laid!,” you still couldn’t pay me to watch Bates Motel with my mother, and I mean that as the highest compliment. Sandman” by the piano, for instance-simmer with Oedipal dysfunction.
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Their frequent, dizzyingly pitched battles cycle through pleas, sobs, rages, and apologies so fast that Freud’s head would spin, but even the quieter moments-harmonizing “Mr. Norma and Norman’s mercurial relationship propels Bates Motel with queasy abandon. Mama Bates’s jingle-jangle ballad represents the Psycho prequel at its deranged, discomfiting best. “Maybe this time, I’ll be lucky,” she warbles. “And I wanna be close.” As you might expect, though, it’s Norma who lays claim to the star turn, and Farmiga’s nervy, a cappella rendition of Kander and Ebb’s “Maybe This Time” transforms the Cabaret love song into a strange and strangely moving warning against helicopter parenting. “You’re just getting so grown up,” she says, rubbing his shoulders.
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In “Shadow of a Doubt,” the excellent second episode of the A&E drama’s sophomore season, Norma Bates (Vera Farmiga) goads her stringy, teenaged son (Freddie Highmore) into auditioning for a local production of South Pacific, her voice lofted to a childlike whine. If you’ve ever wondered how Norman Bates and his mother spent their days before he cut up Marion Crane, Bates Motel has your answer: They went out for musicals.