Bates Motel Checks in at Last

The fifth and final season of Bates Motel will premiere on SoHo on April 26 — which will be roughly 24 hours after it ends in the US.

It’s puzzling and disappointing that SoHo has delayed the last season for so long, which picks up two years after Norma’s death.

Typically, it airs a show’s final season as close to the US as it can manage because of heightened interest in how it wraps.

But despite a SoHo rep claiming Bates Motel is still popular here, the two-and-a-half month lag between US and NZ screenings will be one of the biggest there’s been since SoHo launched.

SoHo held back season four’s premiere, too, but at least partially caught up by running double-eps.

But there are no plans to do likewise with S5 — episodes will play out in weekly one-hour instalments.

“I believe we have such a super-full schedule that it was a matter of making room for everything,” says a SoHo publicist.

If so, this points to one of Sky’s most egregious sins: despite operating in an unprecedented golden age of TV drama, it continues to programme its premium drama channel with typically only two hours of original content Monday-Thursday and just one hour on Sundays.

Friday and Saturday nights have wall-to-wall re-runs.

Sky charges a monthly $10 premium to subscribe to SoHo and it’s inexcusable that fans of a series like Bates Motel should have to wait so long to legally view the final season simply because it suits the satcaster’s cynical, high-rotate scheduling strategy.