Inside Bates Motel: Reimagining A Cinema Icon

The Paley Center celebrates Bates Motel, A&E’s compelling new hit series, with a special episode preview screening and conversation with members of the cast and creative team. Developed by executive producers Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Kerry Ehrin (Friday Night Lights), the series serves as a contemporary prequel to the genre-defining Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho, giving viewers an intimate portrayal of how Norman Bates’s psyche unravels through his teenage years. Centered on one of the medium’s most deeply intricate mother-son relationships, Bates Motel has reinvented the world around its core characters, placing Norman (Freddie Highmore) and his mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) in the context of the eerily “perfect” town of White Pine Bay, and populating that town with residents whose own personal mysteries unfold in surprising ways.

Executive producer Carlton Cuse notes, “Norman Bates is one of the more iconic characters in the history of cinema. To me, the fun challenge of this project that Kerry Ehrin and I faced was not only bringing him and his family to life but also inventing the world around them.” As Ehrin notes, “This world has a dark, fairy tale quality in many ways—just without the fairies. The shadowed world of subconscious desires and secrets we keep, even from ourselves, provides the landscape. Set in a structure of fast-paced, twist-and-turn storytelling, these themes and ideas emerge in a unique, shocking, moving, and weirdly fun way.”