The Sinner Just Keeps Getting Creepier In Season 3

Even in the era of Peak TV, the police procedural may be the genre that has changed the least. Dick Wolf and Jerry Bruckheimer have slowly but surely drained most of the imagination out of it, PBS keeps bringing it back to historical times, and even the most imaginative cable versions settle more on style than anything else – for all the stylistic flourishes, True Detective often seemed more concerned with the darkness of the main characters than the actual mysteries.

For that reason, The Sinner stands out like a beacon – a battered, broken one, but still a light. Centering around Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman in a role he was born to play), and mostly centered around the small upstate town of Dorchester, every season has essentially begun the same way. A murder takes place. We see the actions leading up to it, and we see the killer commit the crime. Harry is called in, basically to fill out the paperwork, and slowly he finds out that there is a deeper meaning to something that seems cut and dry. In Season 3, he is called in to an automobile accident that killed the driver and left the passenger alive.  We meet the passenger in the opening minutes of season premiere. His name is Jamie (Matt Bomer, a revelation) he’s a private school teacher with a wife days away from giving birth. On the surface, he seems to have the perfect life. Then five minutes into the premiere, Nick shows up.

Everything about Nick seems off somehow. There seems to be meaning behind everyone of his lines, and whatever he says unsettles Jamie. But that’s nothing compared to what happens when Jamie survives the crash. One could easily come to the conclusion that he’s suffering from some kind of shock or PTSD. But there’s something much darker in his behavior. It’s clear from the last episode that when the two were growing up, Nick brings out the worst in people, and there is some part of Jamie that craves that kind of behavior. The part that makes you think that surviving the car crash may be the best thing to befall him over the course of the series.

Harry wants to understand, but with each successive season you really wonder how much each new case takes out of him. Indeed, the first time we see Harry, he is being gently recommended by one of his colleague that the time might have come for him to retire. His daughter, who we see for the first time, isn’t exactly wild about the fact that he lives by himself in a house way out in the boondocks where he has to walk around just to get cell service. Harry knows this job is draining him, but he can’t turn away from it. We see in his half-hearted attempts to get along with his daughter and grandson that he just isn’t suited for being a family man, and we know from previous episodes, he isn’t much of a friend. The job is all he can cling to.

The Sinner is by far one of the creepiest series I’ve ever seen. Every time you dive into its puzzle box, you get a look at a layer of human nature you don’t know if you want to comprehend. Chris Messina, one of the great actors of television, plays Nick as if there is something in him that doesn’t care about life. At one point, we see him and Jamie standing on top of a building, looking as if jumping was the easiest thing in the world. Just how close to the surface is the idea of oblivion, and what would it take to bring it out in us?

It’s always hard to tell where this show is going in the early episodes. We still don’t understand the connection between Nick and the artist whose land the accident ended up taking place on. But there is something malevolent and fascinating about The Sinner that continues to draw me in. There’s something that we don’t want to see, but like Harry, we can’t look away.

My score: 4.25 stars,