This seems to be the season for serial killer prequels, and I had several people whose taste I trust reccommend Hannibal to me. Which I will watch eventually, but here is why I am hesitant so far:

1.) My backstory with the franchise. To wit: I read and loved Silence of the Lambs (which I managed to do just before the film came out), read and also liked, though a bit less, Red Dragon (though that had been written first), watched the film of Silence and loved it, watched Manhunter which is very 1980s stylized cinema, and at the time I was in a scriptwriting class where the tutor kept insisting that Manhunter was the much better film, so of course we all felt rebellious and prefered Silence. Fast forward a few years, and Hannibal, the novel, got published. (Yes, I know that's not the basis for the show - Hannibal the novel was a sequel, the show is a prequel). Which, um. Was probably the first work of fiction that introduced me to the concept of villain decay. (Not linking to tv tropes for the sake of your spare time.) (I did not read Hannibal Rising at all.) Not that it doesn't have its moments, both gruesome and darkly humorous: the one where on-the-run Dr. Lecter is returning to the US via a cheap economy class seat, squeezed in between tourists, because he knows his profile says he'd never do that plus no one controls hordes of July and August travelling tourists (true before 9/11), and has to deal with yelling children throughout the eight hour flight is hysterical. But what happens to Clarice is, well, to put it as unspoilery as possible, a bad authorial idea (it's like bad fanfic made canon), and as for Lecter himself, as I said, first example of literary villain decay - the more his author tries to explain him, the more he loses his effectiveness, and not in a good way. (As opposed to villains who gain by being fleshed out.) So, firmly believing in the "don't stick around to complain, if you don't like it, get out of the franchise" principle, I stopped. I hadn't intended to watch the show at all for that reason until I kept hearing good things about it.

2.) Dexter and Dexter (meaning, the show and the character). As different as Dexter Morgan and Hannibal Lecter are: I gathered via fannish osmosis that the basic premise of Hannibal, the show, is Will Graham (the hero of Red Dragon) solving crimes in the years before Lecter is discovered, with Dr. Lecter both helping and sabotaging. Now one of several factors which soured me on Dexter and Dexter is this: after the first season, we were treated to more and more occasions where Dexter kept sabotaging police investigations so he could keep the serial killer of the season alive for his own selfish reasons (mostly, but not solely because he wants to kill them himself, being a serial killer of killers). This had catastrophic results more often than not, never more so than in season 4, after which you really think that if the show wanted to present Dexter as a protagonist who in any way could learn from his experience, he would have after the s4 events, but no such thing. Correspondingly, the ensemble of supporting characters, who started out vividly and with their own stories, became more and more a Greek chorus and/or caricatures of themselves. With the exception of Dexter's sister Deb, who is basically a co-lead and a fantastic character, but alas, she, too, went into decline eventually, with what felt to me as the character being sacrificed both on a Watsonian and Doylist level to Dexter being still at large and the show being able to continue. So I asked myself: can I stand watching another show where the very premise ensures that the serial killer does that same thing Dexter does and the non-serial killer detective may go the same way Deb did? (Depending on how long the show would go on, because yes, Graham eventually catching Lecter is sort of inevitable as a closing point, I'd guess.)

3.) I'm no longer in my 20s, which was when I had a thing for glamorous übervillains. Sometimes I still do, but it's much, much rarer.

However, Hannibal isn't the only tv show tackling an iconic serial killer and his back story on the market right now. As the recent Hitchcock (starring Anthony Hopkins as Alfred H., how is that for intertextual cross reference) reminded me, American cinema's first iconic serial killer was probably Norman Bates from Psycho. (I say "American" because I would argue that in terms of world cinema, Germany got there first, via Peter Lorre's serial killer in Fritz Lang's M - definitely an iconic performance, and delivered more than two decades before the shower scene was a twinkling in Hitch's eye.) Of course, Norman Bates is in many ways the anti-Lecter. He's not a genius or an aesthete or demonic; he firmly falls into Neil Gaiman's Doll House- made "serial killers are pathetic" point, and he's never presented as unknowable, either; Psycho is s deserved cinematic classic, but the least successful scene in it is the psychiatrist in the last but one scene spelling out the moral of the story for us about Norman and his Oedipus complex. Now Psycho actually spawned several sequels, which had nothing to do with either the Bloch novel the first film was vaguely based on, which in turn was vaguely based on a real life serial killer named Ed McGein, and everything with the fact that Alfred Hitchcock, in direct contrast to Norman Bates' McGein-based description in Bloch's book but with great and character changing effectiveness, had cast Anthony Perkins as Norman. Perkins was gangly and had a nervous geeky-boy-next-door shy charm that made you feel sorry for him. (It's a shame that nobody can watch Psycho unspoiled these days, because the two big twists - Marion Crane, the seeming protagonist played by the big name star of the film, being killed off a third in, and then the true identity of "Mother" revealed in the film's big climax - are really stunning moments if one does.) (Outside of his career making and dooming role, you can see it best in Orson Welles' The Trial, where he plays Joseph K.) Feeling somewhat sorry for Norman despite all and hoping his mental illness is treatable, but also fearing it's not, is what the by now forgotten sequels trade on, and at a guess, it's one of the reasons why a prequel was even considered. I was still surprised a tv show got made, because a) as opposed to Hannibal's premise, a Psycho prequel wouldn't offer cases of the week, and b) American tv loves its daddy issues and bromances. Not, or rarely (hello, Tony and Livia Soprano) its mother-son-relationship from hell, mommy issues, and indeed, a mother as a central character who by the very nature of the story she's in can't be a heroine a la Sarah Connor. (Even if they are Sarah Connor, they get cancelled after two seasons, grrr, argh.) (You can see where this is going if you know me.) To make a tv show out of this struck me as an undertaking of Sisyphus proportions, which made me curious. Also, the season, now completed, had only ten episodes, so wouldn't be too time consuming. So I thought, what the hell. Let's give it a try.

Bates Motel, which has a greenlighted second season, I'm told, did reward me. And that has less to do with teenage Norman Bates (mind you, that's a good performance by Freddie Highmore, whom I remember playing little Peter Llewelyn Davies to Johnny Depp's James Barrie in Finding Neverland, and who has Perkins' body language down pat), more with the show creators managing to pull of a quite Hitchcockian and David Lynchean mixture of suspense, black humour and tragedy, and most with Vera Farmiga as Norma Bates. Norma of course is a character whom the show had much more liberty to create, since the audience never actually "meets" her in Psycho. (Not that the show isn't an openly AU prequel anyway, since it moves the entire action to the present instead of going for the 40s.) Given what eventually happens, I was somewhat wary of a "it's all Mom's fault" tale, but no. Nothing is as simple as that. And Norma is such a vivid, rich character, impulsive, loving, controlling, repressive, resourceful, mamma bearish, hopelessly damaged, helplessly damaging. And she's in the proverbial tree with fire around her and no rescue in sight, especially given that the town she and Norman move into in the pilot, White Pines, is visibly influenced by Twin Peaks as a take on the small-town-with-a-rotten-underbelly trope. I had seen Vera Farmiga once or twice before and remembered her as a brunette (plus in those Psycho sequels, there is at one point a flashback in which Olivia Hussey plays a young Norma Bates, so I had always assumed Norma was brown haired like her son), but the show's choice of letting her be blonde works as a great meta commentary. Because she is a Hitchcock blonde, not of the icy but the neurotic type (and at the same time she's the Hitchcock hero, barely holding it together), and not watched from the outside but the inside. And it's a brave performance - the show does comedy scenes using Farmiga's expressive face to hilarious effect, and it does point blank tragedy - the scene in the season finale where Norma finally talks truthfully about her own childhood being a stunning case in point - and the actress creates a coherent whole of both. I think a key to why Norma is so sympathetic to me is that Vera Farmiga plays her with an odd innocence; that is, even when she's manipulative at times, she's not deliberately cruel or malicious. This being the mother and son who end up the way the audience knows they will, the show doesn't down play the wrongness vibe in their interactions, au contraire, but it doesn't make it deliberate on Norma's part. And on the few occasions when she's happy, she is so with an unabashed, joyful, childlike glee that I found it heartbreaking every time because you know the next dreadful revelation/event is right around the corner. Basically I ended the season desperately wanting Norma to run away from her doomed narrative. Preferably with Emma, who is another great female character. More about Emma herself in a moment, but for now, there is Bechdel test passing with Norma and Emma, which defies expectations, expectations being that Norma reacts hostile to girls interested in her son. Now one reason why she doesn't do that with Emma is that Norman isn't attracted to Emma, yes, but there is also the fact Emma is the sole person who doesn't respond judgmentally (or sexually interested) to Norma, which makes for so far the sole sane relationship in her life.

Other than moving the entire action to the present, the show's biggest addition to the myth was probably to give Norman an older half brother, Dylan, who has the Logan Echolls syndrome of being introduced as a total jerk and later sold as a secret heart of gold which works for the most part except for that pesky memory of his early jerkitude actions (though probably only for yours truly; Veronica Mars fandom loved Logan, what comments I could find in Bates Motel love Dylan) . Mind you, this being the family it is, Dylan's jerkitude improving through the season and the good core within is an obvious flipside to Norman's geeky harmlessness and the future serial killer within, just as their initial attitudes towards Norma - Norman idolizing her, Dylan blaming her for everything - are flipsides of each other which started to change throughout the story. Ditto for Norma's attitudes towards them, though in both cases you can ask the chicken and egg "who started it" question. ( Mind you, Dylan is the result of a teenage pregnancy and the deep anger he and Norma have towards each other at the start of the show wouldn't have been surprising with that alone in mind, but later revelations also bring up the possibility of an additional reason.) It's also the show's way of playing out two differently screwed up mother-son-relationships, and keeping the audience guessing, since while Norma's and Norman's fates are sealed by prequelitis, Dylan's is not.

Nor are those of the other original characters. Nestor Carbonell, whom producer Carlton Cuse brought along from Lost, gets to be enigmatic (remember Richard in Lost before the telenovela backstoy?) and morally ambigous again as Sheriff Alex Romero, and one of the Twin Peaksian elements is the juxtaposing of a horror story with teenage soap opera. Thus, Norman crushes on high school beauty Bradley (another blonde, and but anti-stereotpically not heartless or bitchy; she's just not in love with Norman), while Emma, whom he befriends due to mutual outsiderness (she has Cystic Fibrosis, a life expectancy of 27 years, and walks around with an oxygen tank all the time), crushes hopelessly on him. Except that Emma is not in a John Hughes film and the teenage boy she fell for is a future serial killer, which makes Emma another character the audience is massively worried for. The different reactions of Norman and Emma to a key discovery is a good way of show, not tell, about where Norman is headed. Finding a book with Chinese writing and drawings that at first appear to be erotic in the motel, Norman keeps, not surprisingly for a teenage boy, browsing through it. Then the drawings turn darker, and it becomes clear the women in them are in pain, chained up. Norman keeps reading. Emma, going through the same book of drawings, concludes it could be a true story, and if so, they need to find evidence of what happend to the girls (and, if possible, the girls). He sees objects, she sees individuals. (If Norman were an original character whose destiny we didn't know, this would not necessarily be proof of anything but hormonal teenagerness, but as it is, Freddie Highmore's blank face when looking at those drawings is pretty chilling.) And for all that Emma is going through a teenage crush, that's not how the narrative defines her; she's also the closest thing the show has to a detective character (figuring out what happened to the Chinese girls and also the town's involvement in drug trade), and as mentioned, in the later half of the season becomes surprisingly friendly with Norma. (Which, given that other people Norma interacts with from White Pine either consider her insane, or want her dead, or in one case rape her, is direly needed.)

(Sidenote: sadly, the storyline with the Chinese girl is also one of the fails of the show in that for all the importance the difference of perspective of Emma and Norman have, the show itself also falls into the trap of making her an object; we're not supposed to be interested in her beyond how her story affects the main characters.)

Given several British crime shows I've watched, including most recently Scott and Bailey, are located in Manchester, I found it amusing that closest-thing-to-a-detective-character Emma is, drumroll, from Manchester originally; her father, played by Ian Hart, is a Mancunian taxidermist who emigrated for various reasons. (Ian Hart: to me is mainly a quite convincing on screen John Lennon, whom he played in The Hours and the Times and Backbeat, but these days probably is best known to an international audience as Professor Quirrell from the first Harry Potter movie.) And yes, Norman learns how to deal with (animal) corpses from him. Then again, the British element in this American tale may have been intended as a nod to Hitchcock as well.

All in all: I'm not sure for how many seasons they can keep this up (Norman is already 17 in this one, after all, and he appears to be in his early to mid-20s in the film version of Psycho), but somehow, they really made me care. Most of all for Norma the doomed and stubbornly trying and so very very broken. Talk about setting yourself up for watcher heartache, self.)