10 Best Single Horror TV Seasons Ever

Apr 28, 2022 April 28th, 2022

1. Bates Motel - Season 5

For your writer, Bates Motel is the greatest horror show in recent memory. Across all fives of its seasons, this A&E offering managed to maintain the sort of consistent high quality rarely seen. To pinpoint one season as being the series' highpoint is a tough task, but it's fair to say that Bates Motel has the unique honour of saving its finest season until last.

By the time of Season Five, the action has jumped ahead two years from the conclusion of the previous season. Here, Norma Bates is dead, Detective Romero is locked up in prison, Marion Crane is introduced, Norman is in full 'Mother' mode, and the expectancy was high for the show to fully showcase its own version of what was seen in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho way back in 1960.

Bates Motel is the ideal example of taking an existing IP and reworking it for a new audience while also staying somewhat faithful to what has gone before. In that final season, the audience had a fear of how this may all end, and when it does end, it does so in the most heartbreaking, inevitable way.

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Andrew Pollard

Senior Writer

Once described as the Swiss Army Knife of WhatCulture, Andrew can usually be found writing, editing, or presenting on a wide range of topics. As a lifelong wrestling fan, horror obsessive, and comic book nerd, he's been covering those topics professionally as far back as 2010. In addition to his current WhatCulture role of Senior Content Producer and Presenter, Andrew previously spent nearly a decade as Online Editor and Lead Writer for the world's longest-running genre publication, Starburst Magazine, and his work has also been featured on BBC, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, WhatToWatch, Sportkskeeda, and various other outlets, in addition to being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic. Between his main day job, his role as lead panel host of Wales Comic Con, and his gig as a pre-match host for Wrexham AFC games, Andrew has also carried out a hugely varied amount of interviews, from the likes of Robert Englund and Eli Roth to Kevin Smith and the Russo Brothers, to Kevin Conroy and Frank Miller, to Bret Hart and Sting, to Mickey Thomas, Joey Jones, Phil Parkinson, and Brian Flynn, to many, many more. Where his beloved Wrexham AFC is concerned, Andrew is a long-standing season ticket holder and an FSA Award-winner for his time co-hosting the Fearless in Devotion podcast.

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