TV Series - Bates Motel
I'm curious what everyone on here thought of the series? I for one, enjoyed the first season, but thought it went downhill after that.
share@Sammi. A bunch of regulars from IMDb days watched BM's final season (Season 5), i.e., once BM was going to stage counterparts of the film's central actions (Marion Crane showing up, and so on).
The main discussion thread from that watch-along has been preserved, albeit with some formatting lost, here at moviechat:
https://tinyurl.com/yanew2f7
To summarize, most of us thought BM was a solid, good faith effort. Good to great acting from the leads was the show's ace, and strong X-files/Twin Peaks Northwest Woods visuals went down easy too. A valuable addition to Psycho (1960)'s legacy overall.
I think some of my remarks are in those threads, but I'm a diehard Psycho fan(Hitchcock version, from Bloch's novel) who felt that the show was intelligent and well acted....and I was certainly proud to see the Psycho story being told half a century after its debut....but:
It really doesn't have much in common with Hitchcock's achievement. The shift in location -- with much great on-location detail in the series -- felt wrong(Hitchcock's tale wasn't set near the OCEAN); the idea of having Mrs. Bates in a series-long arc as a much younger woman rather than as the barely seen, barely heard crone-monster in the movie -- felt wrong. And ultimately, the new version , for all its violence and nasty edges(young Mrs. Bates is raped in the first episode), never had the "scream power" of the original. The decades have made us all tougher.
And I never really watched the early seasons which evidently created a whole different storyline -- with an emphasis on Norman as a high schooler.
I am more proud of the idea that Bates Motel is a big hit than I am proud of Bates Motel.