Doom Service: Showrunners Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin on Bates Motel

The March premiere of Bates Motel scared up record-breaking ratings for A&E, prompting the cable network to lock in a second season just three episodes in. Good news for fans. Better news for showrunners Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin. The the two now have plenty of time to conjure ten more eerie episodes. But where that second season will find Norman Bates and his mother, Norma, will for now remain a mystery. “If I said anything, I’d tell everything,” Ehrin demurs. “Let’s just say more secrets are unfolded.” Cuse allows that he and Ehrin “spent a lot of time playing in the danger- ous playgrounds of our own brains.” Their conclusion? “The thing that we love about Norman is his unpredictability,” he offers. “He is, in many respects, a normal seventeen-year-old kid, but there’s this one little part of his genetics that’s off. Hopefully it will be compelling to watch how that evolves.” The first glimpse of Norman’s self-realization came in episode 3. After he and his mother dispose of the body of her rapist, he admits that keeping the man’s belt as a memento probably wasn’t normal. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me?” he cries. “The fascinating thing,” Ehrin says, “is his ability to understand that there’s something wrong with him, or just sense it, but not fully understand what it means." This is a terrifying path Norman that fans are walking walking with Norman, a "very complicated" one with lots of twists and turns, Ehrin said. Navigating those turns with a deft mix of vulnerability and villainy is British actor Freddie Highmore. “It’s a very tricky role,” Cuse says. “Freddie can be extremely charming, but he is capable of menace and danger. That’s a hard set of qualities to find in one actor." "The hallmark of great casting is when you start doing a show and then go, ‘How could we ever have thought anybody else could have played this part?’ That’s how we feel about Freddie. And we feel the same way about Vera [Farmiga] as Norma.” Viewers have particularly responded to the characters’ Oedipal bond. “It wasn’t intended as an overt incestuous aspect,” Ehrin says, “but there is definitely a psychological over-intimacy and a codependence. Norma and Norman are extremely close. They feel safe together emotionally. She’s still thinking of him as a kid, and neither wants to acknowledge that he is growing up because it will break this magical closeness that they have.” When — and if — that bond breaks and Norma morphs from Mommy to mummy, Cuse insists it will come as a surprise. “People think they know where it ends,” he says, “but we don’t plan to give the audience a pre-packaged ending. When we get there, it will be very dramatic, but it will be its own thing.”