You cannot make this up: SABC2 has acquired and scheduled the Alfred Hitchcock horror thriller masterpiece movie Psycho from 1960 for Monday 17 June at 21:30 - and in a stroke of co-incidental genius programming M-Net will start Bates Motel, a new spin-off TV drama series based on Psycho, a few days later in the very same week on Friday 21 June at 21:30.
Now that - as Tropika Island of Treasure Thunder Paradise 5 would say - is a "killer deal".
South African viewers can now watch Psycho and have the complete TV arcana and the background serving as the imprimatur for the new Bates Motel, a new TV drama set in the present, but serving as a "prequel" to Psycho.
The characters in Bates Motel will still turn into the
It's sheer co-incidence and amazing AMAZING luck that SABC2 scheduled Psycho in the very same week as a new TV show based on that movie starts on another TV channel also in South Africa. Both will synegistically complement each other - especially since SABC2 in the following weeks will show the Psycho movie sequel from the 1980s!
Psycho II will be on Monday 24 June on SABC2 at 21:30 (there's actually two further Psycho movies after this but SABC2 is only showing the first two). Although not as acclaimed as the 1960s masterpiece, the 1983 follow-up also has Anthony Perkins playing a now older Norman Bates.
In Bates Motel (with blatant allusions to Twin Peaks), mamma Norma Louse (Vera Famiglia) and teenage son Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) buy a rundown hotel in the coastal town of White Pine Bay and move there. Of course the word "strange" and "weird" are the best to describe the whole town and townsfolk.
This co-incidence of movie in the same week as the show following decades later based on it, is sheer television catnip for pop culturati, enough to make make you go a bit ... psycho.
