BATES MOTEL
A&E, 10:00 p.m. ET
Last week, Bates Motel inaugurated its final season by introducing some delicious new twists. Chief among them is that Norma Bates, played by Vera Farmiga, is dead – but that doesn’t mean she’s not still hanging around the house, and in the disturbed imagination of Freddie Highmore’s Norman Bates. This has made Bates Motel even more fascinating, unhinged and entertaining: Farmiga gets to act not as the old “living” Norma, but as various shades of Norma as concocted by her unduly attached son. Norman, meanwhile, is such a victim of his own imagination that in last week’s episode, when he used the infamous motel peephole to spy on a couple getting amorous in the adjacent room, Norman’s, uh, enjoyment while watching them was interrupted by a phone call. From his mother. Who asked what he was doing. And she’s dead. TV doesn’t get more twisted, or more unpredictable, than this.