The Sinner As Adaptation
The Sinner television series is a remarkable achievement in storytelling, regardless of the medium. Its first (and, as originally intended, only) season perfectly forces together a tone of all too human despair with overwhelming, supernatural dread – which, spoiler alert, turns out to be all too human, too, as is only appropriate – through a blend of symbolic imagery and perfectly procured music. I’ll speak more about its specifics in the following entries, but I wanted to compliment its construction first. The TV series succeeds so utterly not as much as a result of its story as its creators’ understanding of what the medium of television – specifically television – has to offer.
I unfortunately cannot speak to how well showrunner Derek Simonds has adapted the original work (in this case a book) into another medium (in this case a TV show), because I have never read nor listened to a reading of the German novel. But I can say what tentative excitement I have for the implications of the success of this and other TV shows adapting books. The constant complaint – so much so that it has gone from trite to laughable to entirely unnecessary at this point – of a movie based on a book is that “they left so much out.” The opportunity that prestige television offers to books and book series – my own darling His Dark Materials chief among them – is really encouraging for those of us who can view these adaptations as the minimum opportunity that they are: a way to let new fans discover the original work that you love so much for all the reasons that you love it. And, ideally, the creators of both understand the highest possibilities of their respective media. The directors of the Watchmen TV show knew what that format could bring to the story, and they made the most of what they had at hand. They did not succeed as fully as the creators of the Watchmen comic series in pushing the boundaries of the medium, but they never could have. In recognizing their limitations, they succeeded.
The Sinner Season One
What Season One of The Sinner does best is give its protagonists (and antagonists) human form. They are – in a literal sense – fleshed out by their presences occupying space on the screen. Their tears have more metaphorical weight as we see the way they drag across skin. Prison and handcuffs seem more oppressive when we can see and hear the way they grate against skin that might well be ours. Less is left to the imagination52.
I had thought – before I sat down to write – that what the show did best was atmosphere. The – again literal – pitch perfect choice of the song “Huggin & Kissin” by Big Black Delta as the sound that accompanies murder, then morphs into something more horrific, then something reassuring somehow, can’t be conveyed fully on the page. You can pull a few tricks as a writer to get a reader most of the way there, but you can’t stay in their head in the same way just the right combination of notes can.
All of the stylistic choices in the world can conspire to elevate material, but – as I regretted to discover when I watched Godzilla: King of the Monsters the night before writing this, which, while bad, only suffers in my judgment for its juxtaposition with the excellent ending of The Sinner Season 3 (more on which later) – without a solid foundation, it’s all fluff. Style without substance. The brilliant substance of The Sinner is something I did not fully consider until I began watching Season 2:
This is not a story about whether or not a criminal committed a horrible crime. You see the crime committed unambiguously and gratuitously. This is a story about why the crime was committed. And if horrible things are sometimes justified.
52Except, of course, that more is. As I said previously, I haven’t read the original book, so I can’t speak to its style or point of view, but in general books offer more insight into what its characters are thinking, what their backgrounds are, and what motivates them. In a show where the style is dominated by silent, unsure looks between characters, all the weight of understanding the characters is on the audience.
The Sinner Season Two
I’m about to type something generic and insipid53. You ready?
Sometimes it’s a good idea to follow a formula. Cooking, for example, is a great time to follow almost all – if not all – of the steps that have reliably led to past success. A little informed improv probably will do you well – putting a little extra cheese on top of the casserole or adding a tiny drip of pineapple extract to the sponge cake – but you don’t want to substitute walnuts when the recipe calls for eggs. They might be roughly the same size and shape, but the result is something likely inedible.
This careful balance between repetition and reinvention is what makes The Sinner’s Season 2 simultaneously my favorite and least favorite season. The brilliance of showing absolute, inarguable guilt – in this case the execution of two people by a child – is repeated. And the layered unpeeling of the events in the various characters’ past is – again – careful to mislead while building to the obvious-too-late truth.
No question that the style of the show phenomenally services the quiet menace of supernatural shadow giving way to the much more frightening casual evil of human beings. And the cast is unquantifiably good; the expectedly brilliant Carrie Coon being outshone only by the child actor Elisha Henig, whose performance is so mesmerizing because – as with the best magicians – the audience is simultaneously in awe of what’s transpiring and trying to figure out how it’s possible. He shouldn’t have the depth of experiences necessary to lay emotions atop one another so that – as soon as he tugs at one – they all become tangled and inseparable.
If he, too, is doing nothing more than improvising on a recipe – observing the signs of emotion in others and mimicking it with a dash of improvisation according to intuition – he does it with the assurance and triumph of a master chef. The story is excellent and expertly executed, but – I believe – with a young actor with a single degree less presence, the season would have been fine, and that would have been the end of it.
But Hening was great. And Season 2 was not the end.
53Shocking, I know.
The Sinner Season Three
And so we come to Season 3. Where they decided to take the formula and blow it up.
In terms of the very basic structure of the show, it remained the same: as Harry – the damaged detective played by Bill Pullman better than I’ve seen Bill Pullman play anything – progresses through gathering evidence spiderwebbing out from a crime, flashbacks of the suspect’s experiences prove or disprove the evidence gathered. But the central element at the show’s core is gone. Matt Bomer’s mid-life-crisis-having high school teacher character isn’t guilty-but-innocent.
He’s just guilty54.
And the show isn’t about dragging someone out of past trauma – or helping them embrace the person it helped them become – so that they can overcome what caused them to kill in the first place. It’s about a man who chose to wallow in trauma. It’s about a man who is selfish enough to inflict trauma on every other person alive as long as it gives him some relief. Season 3 is the birth of a serial killer.
And I do not think it’s an accident that this serial killer is a suburban, White, financially successful, educated, cisgender, mostly straight man55.
The educated part is particularly dangerous. Here is a man who “learns” that man can create morality and, in so doing, sets himself down the path to destruction. In one way I wish that man could embody a kind of morality and – when he is destroyed – it is destroyed for all time. Because then, in the bleeding of this one scapegoat, we could exorcise his particular tumorousness from all mankind for all time.
54I realize I should’ve put a Spoiler Alert somewhere before this all started, but by the time anyone reads this, who knows how long the show will have been off the air.
55I considered putting a sentence along the lines of “Because White men are under attack in America today. There’s nobody more persecuted. Hollywood is trying to erode traditional values.” but the idea that – even with a footnote explaining that it should read sarcastically – someone might read it for a moment as enthusiastic was too much of a bummer for me to try it.
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Alex Diamond 