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Cuse was at the Banff World Media Festival Monday to offer a master class about his creative process. His long tenure in television includes a stint as executive producer of ABC’s mind-bender Lost, a groundbreaking sci-fi series.

But Bates Motel, with its deliberate pace, subtlety and focus on character development, is not the sort of series that would play nicely alongside big-network fare.

Not unlike the journey of Walter White in Breaking Bad, Norman’s descent has become a delicate balancing act where writers have kept him sympathetic while increasingly ramping up his more unsettling qualities.

Season 4 is when it will all come to a head, Cuse says.

“For the first three seasons of the show, we have watched in a slow, progressive way his development of becoming the guy he is going to become,” says Cuse. “When the show started, for Kerry and I, he was just a kid. He was a kid who had blackouts and some issues and stuff. But at the end of the third season of the show, he really becomes unhinged in a different way he had before. That really sets up a different version of the Norman that we know from the movie. The progression of that character now is very exciting. He’s going to be driving the story. He’s going to be doing some surprising things.”

When Bates Motel debuted in 2013, Cuse admits the series had to overcome some serious cynicism about the show’s premise.

“First of all, there had been a number of sequels to the original Psycho, none of which were well-received,” he said. “People were like ‘Why are you retreading on this territory?’ It’s really tough when you are in the shadow of an iconic movie. For us, the thing that was the key was to make it wildly different from the movie. We made it a contemporary prequel. We extracted these two characters from the narrative, we kept the iconic house and the motel. We have the characters of Norma and Norman but they are in a modern setting in Oregon. Everything else about the show is brand new and different. It took awhile for the audience and for critics to figure out what we were doing. Now I think they’ve embraced it and realized how good both Vera and Freddie are as actors. It just took awhile for people to realize what we were doing.”