USA’s new series The Sinner, starring and produced by Jessica Biel, airs Wednesday night at 10/9c. The series will span eight episodes.
In the current age of television, it’s better to take a great idea and run with it for a limited time than to drag it out seasons and seasons after it’s run its course.
Gone, for the most part, are the days of sitcoms that stretch on into eternity, eventually gaining a new life in syndication. The current trend in prestige television is to take an idea, generally a procedural or a high-concept premise, and do it really well in a close-ended format.
This trend has often taken the form of anthologies, such as FX’s American Horror Story, where the overarching premise remains the same but the characters and storyline change from season to season.
And that’s the case for
The Sinner
, based upon Petra Hammesfahr’s German novel of the same name.
The Sinner
follows young mom Cora Tannetti, played by Biel, in the immediate aftermath of a violent crime she commits at the beach with her family (husband Mason, played by
Girls
‘ Christopher Abbott, and son Laine.)
Thus, the show is not a typical procedural that aims to find out who committed the crime, but rather why Cora, a young, pretty, white, middle-class mom, would be driven to such violence.
At the center of that question is detective Harry Ambrose, played by Bill Pullman, who becomes obsessed with finding an answer.
Biel has always seemed to have latent talent that, thus far in her career, has gone mostly untapped. Perhaps her most impressive film role to date was as Sophie in 2006’s The Illusionist, as the unattainable object of magician Eisenheim’s (played by Edward Norton) affection.
But it makes sense that Biel is finally getting to sink her teeth into something meaningful in the same place her career took off: television.
Most people know Biel from her 10-year run on 7th Heaven, and while back when that show ended in 2006 the way to build a career was in films, the landscape has shifted heavily in television’s favor.
Biel recognizes this fact both as an actress and an executive producer, taking on the latter role for the first time in her career.
Television allows for myriad ways of telling a story, and The Sinner is drawing comparisons to Showtime’s The Affair for its frequent use of flashbacks. That’s good company, surely, for a USA Network show to be in.
In a TV landscape filled with male antiheroes (Tony Soprano, Dexter, Walter White, Don Draper, Omar Little), there are correspondingly fewer flawed female leads (Nurse Jackie and Nancy Botwin come to mind).
Thus, it’s a welcome departure from the norm for Biel to have such a complex and nuanced role to play.
However, there’s something inherently problematic about the central premise upon which the series rests; that what Cora does is so shocking because she’s pretty, white, and a woman. It would be hard to build a series that so heavily rests upon the question of why if Cora were of a different demographic.
The Sinner will have to really deliver on vertical depth, because there’s not much horizontally; though the flashbacks are a clever device to expand the story, most of this show is going to be Cora and Detective Ambrose sitting in a room together.
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It’s a worthy challenge for Biel, and one that could reinvigorate her career.
The Sinner premiers Wednesday, August 2 at 10/9c on USA Network.