Folks at my day job love to talk about TV shows and give me
stink-eye when I tell them I don’t watch TV. Sorry I can't discuss last night's episode around the water cooler - I have books to write. I can
squeeze in Downton Abbey once a year,
but I’ve pretty much lost interest in True
Blood. Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire just aren’t my thing.
Then along comes Bates
Motel, and a trusted, Gothic-wired friend who has been following it encouraged
me to watch. I’m not exactly opposed to exploring the back story of Norman and
his mother, and I like the fact that they live in the correct house complete to
its period furnishings, but Bates Motel
fails to work for me on a number of levels.
First and foremost is the predictability of the script. From
the moment the creepy relative of the former motel owner shows up, I knew he was
coming back after dark to cause havoc. From the moment the sheriff and his
deputy show up, I knew the suspicious one would put Norma through the ringer,
and Norma and the pretty one would get the hook up. From the moment the girl
with CF showed up, I knew Norman
was going to go for her and not the daddies’ girls with straightened blond
hair. The success of nearly every TV series that has captured viewer’s interest
en masse over the past decade has
been grounded in unpredictability. Bates
Motel plays like a retread of every bad 80s horror movie. Here, that’s not
a good thing.
To add salt to the wound of bad writing, I found the graphic
rape scene in extremely poor taste. But I was more offended by Norman and
Norma’s lack of emotional response and subsequent psychological fall out. The
post-rape scenes as written, as well as the actors’ performance, were appallingly
underplayed. In the world of Bates Motel,
a violent sexual assault and subsequent murder is taken in stride, just another
day on the job, just another dead body to wrap in carpet and dump in the swamp.
I made it through the second episode, but it was only more
of the same. I won’t be watching more. With the level of quality competition in
cable TV series these days, I expect a show to hit the ground running. Bates Motel doesn’t seem to know what
genre it is. Is it murder mystery? Is it horror? Is it paranormal? It’s
certainly not psychological thriller, which is what it should be. Bates Motel should take a cue from a
show like The Killing, a relentlessly
grim psychological thriller/murder mystery. Obviously, the Bloch estate sold
the rights to the characters, but nothing in this series’ exploration of the
insidious relationship between a savage killer with MPD and his sexually
repressed, religious fanatic of a mother does any justice to the Robert Bloch
characters we know and love via the Hitchcock film.
In the words of the late Roger Ebert, two thumbs down.
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