To sustain five seasons, Bates Motel wisely avoided the "killer of the week" format. It adopted the Twin Peaks model: a surreal small town with a hidden underworld.
In the early seasons, Highmore played Norman as a sweet, awkward, socially isolated teenager—more reminiscent of a misunderstood misfit than a slasher villain. The horror came not from what he was , but from what we knew he would become . The tension for the audience lay in the "Icarus" narrative: we watched a boy try to fly, only to have his wings melted by his mother’s suffocating love and his own undiagnosed mental illness. bates motel -2013-