“A tortured novelist who takes seven years to write a book gets cut a lot of slack. But if you are capable of producing a well-honed hour of filmed entertainment every eight days, how big a deal can it be to come up with a new idea?”
Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesCarlton Cuse, who along with Damon Lindelof executive produced and acted as showrunners of ABC’s Lost, is boarding A&E’s The Bates Motel.
A&E is developing the series, being produced by Mark Wolper and Roy Lee, as a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The 1960 horror classic featured an off-his-rocker motel manager named Norman Bates who murdered occasional boarders while under the watch of his even-more-psychotic mother.
Bates Motel aims to tell the story of a young Bates and how his life with his deranged mother and her lover unhinged his mind, eventually turning him into a serial killer. It has been described as a cross between Twin Peaks and Smallville.
If the show is picked up to series, Cuse will executive produce and oversee the writing and production what is being envisioned intially as a six-episode “event” that would lead to additional seasons. It also marks the first “genre” TV project for Cuse since his acclaimed run on Lost.
Kerry Ehrin, who worked on Friday NIght Lights and Parenthood, also is joining Bates Motel as a writer/EP and will work with Cuse.
A&E is hoping the series can do for it what zombie drama The Walking Dead did for AMC, generating top ratings while initiating online water-cooler conversations.
Post-Lost, Cuse, with his Carlton Cuse Productions banner, is working in both TV and features. He recently turned in a draft of an untitled action-adventure for Hugh Jackman and Shawn Levy‘s 21 Laps for Fox.
Cuse is repped by WME and Del Shaw Moonves Tanaka Finkelstein & Lezcano.
