Created by Derek Simonds – Starring Jessica Biel, Bill Pullman, Christopher Abbott, and Abby Miller
After Cora Tannetti (Jessica Biel) suddenly kills a man on a beach, Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) becomes convinced there is more to the crime than anyone understands.
The interesting thing about The Sinner is that we know almost everything right away. We know who committed the crime. We know what she did. We know how she did it.
The mystery is never about who. It’s about why.
That’s a really interesting way to build a mystery. Bill Pullman’s Ambrose becomes obsessed with figuring out what happened to Cora and what could have led her to commit such a violent act.
But The Sinner doesn’t really give you clues in the traditional sense. Instead, it keeps introducing new pieces of Cora’s past that make you think you’ve found the answer. Each new revelation sends you down another road.
By the time we get to the real explanation, there isn’t much of a trail leading you there. You couldn’t really have solved it yourself because the show hasn’t given you much reason to consider that possibility. But it is surprising, and more importantly, the show kept me interested enough that I wanted to know where it was going.
Bill Pullman is very good as Ambrose. He’s a strange, complicated detective, and I like the kind of mystery where everyone else is telling the detective he’s wasting his time while he keeps digging anyway. Jessica Biel is also good as Cora, particularly as the character becomes increasingly difficult to understand.
The show does ask you to suspend your disbelief quite a bit. There are choices made throughout the season that pull me out of the story because what we’re being told doesn’t always line up with what we’re actually seeing. Some of the characters and situations simply don’t make much sense if you stop to think about them for too long.
But The Sinner has enough momentum to carry you past those moments. The finale keeps ratcheting up the revelations until the whole thing becomes pretty insane, but I was still glued to it because I needed to know how all of this was going to come together.
The sex and kink also feel very much like a product of their time. There’s something very late-2010s prestige television about the way the show seems to feel obligated to prove that it’s an adult drama.
The Sinner isn’t always convincing, but it is compelling. And when a mystery is strange enough to make me question what I’m watching while still making me want to find out what happens next, that’s worth something.
TV Verdict: Worth Watching