Carrie Coon looking off into the distance on The SinnerImage via USA Network
By
Jessica Toomer
Published 17 minutes ago
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
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It takes a lot for a crime procedural to genuinely stun today’s TV audience, but The Sinner managed to do so in its very first episode. In a landscape overflowing with grim mysteries and trauma-heavy prestige experiments, this quiet little thriller, starring Bill Pullman, Jessica Biel, Carrie Coon, Matt Bomer, and more, detonated its story with a single, shockingly ordinary act of violence. Its first season positioned it as a different kind of murder show, one whose thrill wasn’t in uncovering who committed the crime (you saw that from minute one). Instead, the obsession came from the slow, unsettling descent into why it happened, a cerebral unspooling that gave each season its own flavor of dread.
The Crime in 'The Sinner' Isn't Actually the Point
At its core, The Sinner was an anthology built around one unsettling constant: an ordinary person crosses a line no one imagined they could, and a seasoned detective named Harry Ambrose — Pullman with his bushiest beard and most beleaguered stare — digs through the psychological wreckage to uncover what pushed them there. When it premiered on USA in 2017, it was one of the few shows of its kind, but even now, with so many imitators filling up our streaming platforms, The Sinner still stands out. When most crime dramas spotlight the monsters among us, The Sinner is more interested in motives, in what compels a person to do the unthinkable, and how they cope with the aftermath.
The hard part about this is that you can’t surprise the audience with the crime itself. The Sinner sidesteps that problem by making the “why” so twisted, layered, and unsettling that you can’t look away. Season 1 drops you into the small-town chaos of Cora Tannetti (Biel), a seemingly ordinary mother who stabs a man in broad daylight for reasons she can’t articulate. The mystery isn’t the act itself, but everything that led to it; it’s uncovering the layers of her past, the religious repression, and the buried trauma that push her to the edge. Season 2 shifts focus to Julian (Elisha Henig), a preteen who becomes the center of a bizarre double homicide during a family road trip. Here, the suspense comes from teasing apart what a kid knows, what he’s capable of, and how the adults around him manipulate the narrative, with Carrie Coon’s Vera adding emotional complexity to the case.
By Season 3, the series lands on Jamie (Bomer), a man whose seemingly perfect life unravels when a figure from his past, Nick (Chris Messina), resurfaces to poke holes in his carefully maintained facade. And Season 4 drops Pullman's Ambrose in a sleepy Maine town, where a missing boy drags him back into the kind of twisted family dynamics he's been trying to escape. Across all four seasons, the crimes themselves are just the jumping-off point. The real suspense is psychological, and the central figures are never fully readable.
Each mystery is a study in human behavior, with Ambrose as the connective tissue guiding us through the morally ambiguous terrain of why people do the things they do, and each season of The Sinner has its own identity, which is part of the fun. Season 1 turned Biel into a force of nature, unraveling a life stilted by abuse and childhood trauma. Season 2 was all Coon, a show-stealer whose presence elevated a story about cults and creepy kids. By Season 3, Bomer’s polished exterior starts to crack under Ambrose’s keen eye, revealing how quickly control can slip. The anthology format let the series explore new psyches each year while keeping the investigation sharp, compelling, and suspenseful.
Bill Pullman Is 'The Sinner's Secret Weapon
Bill Pullman as Detective Harry Ambrose in The SinnerImage via USA
Bill Pullman does some of his best work in The Sinner. His Harry Ambrose is the kind of detective you can’t stop watching, even when he’s just brooding silently in the corner of a police station. He’s world-weary without tipping into cliché, empathetic without becoming a saint, and haunted in a way that makes every case feel personal. Ambrose isn’t chasing wins to bolster his career; he’s quietly untangling the human messes that other investigators might overlook, which makes him endlessly compelling as both a character and a lens through which the series unfolds.
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Posts 1 By Andrea Ciriaco Nov 13, 2025Across all four seasons, Ambrose carries the show’s emotional weight, reframing each case with a mix of patience, curiosity, and self-destructive tendencies. He’s honest and human in a world of people who are often unknowable, from Cora’s repressed fury to Julian’s unsettling innocence to Jamie’s too-glossy sheen. Watching Ambrose navigate these puzzles is as much about his own cracks as it is about the suspects’, and that balance — between detective and flawed human being — keeps the anthology grounded, smart, and surprisingly intimate.
'The Sinner' Still Nails TV Tension Years Later
Christopher Abbott looking intense in the crowd in The SinnerImage via USA Network
Years after it first aired, The Sinner still feels fresh because it’s a thriller that values tension over spectacle, character over gimmicks, and careful psychological excavation over theatrics. Each season introduces a new “sinner” whose life is riddled with secrets and watching them unravel is as compelling as the crimes themselves. The show doesn’t need red herrings or over-the-top twists to keep you invested — the suspense comes from the messy, believable human behavior at its core.
So, if you’re a fan of TV that rewards patience, intelligence, and a little moral discomfort, The Sinner is essential viewing. It’s not flashy or ostentatious, but it’s unnervingly smart, with performances that stick and mysteries that linger long after the credits roll. Every season offers a new character, a new puzzle, and the same unflinching look at how easily people can do extraordinary, and often horrifying, things. Start it, and prepare to clear your schedule.
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The Sinner
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