Spotlight: Sticking With It

After years of persistence in the unforgiving entertainment industry, Derek Simonds ’90 has found a hit with The Sinner.

Jana F. Brown

Derek Simonds ’90 (c.) directing an episode of The Sinner.

There was a time when Derek Simonds ’90 was considering a new career path. Disheartened by the struggle to find consistent work as a writer, director, and producer in the entertainment industry, he began to ponder other alternatives.

“I was in my late thirties, and I needed to know if this career was going to be able to support me at all,” says Simonds, who wrote and directed the film Seven and a Match in 2001. “I considered what would happen if I didn’t do this work and made a transition to another field. I figured I should go back to grad school before it was too late.”

It was around that time that Simonds did pivot, but it was within the industry he loved. After years of starts and stops in the world of independent film (and a major heartbreak with a creative parting of ways after writing the initial draft of the Oscar-winning film Call Me By Your Name), he decided to pitch television projects. His first attempts at developing pilots for ABC and TNT offered sound experience, but none of the projects came to fruition. In 2016, Simonds got an unexpected break that changed everything.

Simonds on the set with The Sinner stars Bill Pullman and Jessica Biel

“It turned out that moving into TV was the unexpected pivot that ended up moving me to the next phase,” he explains. He adds with a laugh, “My career started when I was willing to write about cops.”

In the process of pitching to TV executives, Simonds forged relationships with the producers who eventually called him in to discuss a new project being developed for Universal Cable Productions. Simonds was asked to pitch his take on an anthology series based on German crime writer Petra Hammesfahr’s 1999 novel The Sinner. He responded well to the content, was hired as the showrunner for the USA Network series, and soon went from being a relatively inexperienced writer (his TV experience was limited to When We Rise and the The Astronaut Wives Club) to running a writer’s room.

“I was suddenly the chief creator of every decision on the show, from casting to hiring directors to creative decisions,” he says. “After years of frustration, I was suddenly given a very big canvas to tell stories.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Simonds has been running that writer’s room virtually, with endless Zoom meetings, as he plans toward production of The Sinner’s fourth – and possibly final – season. The Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated show features a flawed but compassionate human in Detective Harry Ambrose, played in a quiet and contemplative style by veteran actor Bill Pullman. In adapting the material from book to screen for the first season, Simonds shifted the focus from main character Cora (played by Jessica Biel) to a two-character drama that explored both the woman’s motivations for killing a presumed stranger on a crowded beach as well as the underdeveloped character of Detective Ambrose and his reasons for relating to and befriending the accused. After its initial season, The Sinner was named the No. 1 new cable TV show of the year.

Simonds discusses scenes with Pullman on location.

At its core, the mission of The Sinner is to explore how people deal with trauma, and what lurks in the shadows of the subconscious. “It is only through intimacy in relationships that we can heal that trauma,” says Simonds. “That’s the thesis of the whole show.” While the first season revolves around a traumatized young woman whose circumstances lead to violence, the second season tells the story of a pre-teen boy who has murdered a couple presumed to be his parents – with no apparent motive. In a departure from the traditional police procedural, The Sinner, through its compassionate hero, Detective Ambrose, is more about why people commit crimes than who commits those crimes. Getting to the heart of that why is the challenge and the excitement of the project for Simonds.

“There are cases of psychotic behavior that are just medically explained,” says Simonds. “I am personally as a writer not interested in that because it is a closed scientific answer. I’m interested in the huge portion of others who commit crimes that we can relate to, who are in positions of desperation. The Sinner title resonated because sin has such a pejorative notion. The work of the show is that there is nothing as simple as a sin. It’s never to condone violence, but the mission is to create a rich and fertile gray area. Instead of demonizing behavior, we are forced into an empathetic encounter.”

Through the show, Simonds has been able to spearhead explorations into that gray area of crime and also investigate other topics such as toxic masculinity. Season 3 of The Sinner revolves around a tormented private school English teacher, Jamie Burns (Matt Bomer), who straddles the line between normalcy and deviance. As a culture, Simonds explains, there are few models for intimate friendship between men that are not sexual. The character of Jamie found that connection with a close – but deviant – friend in his twenties and has not been able to connect on a similar level since. He is tormented by that lack of intimacy in his life, and it leads him to question life itself.

(L. to r.) Simonds with Season 3 stars Chris Messina, Pullman, and Matt Bomer. (Photos courtesy Derek Simonds ’90)

“There are no models for the soulmates who are friends, for tenderness between two straight men. What does that look like?” Simonds asks. “If we lived in a world where that was permissible, what would be different in our public lives right now?”

That intimacy and compassion in masculine culture is challenged by Detective Ambrose and in the masterful portrayal of the character by Pullman. He is not intended as an elite mastermind à la Sherlock Holmes, but is a committed detective whose “superpower is empathy,” Simonds explains. “To make the character be very sensitive and emotional was very exciting in terms of disrupting these patriarchal patterns in the detective figure.” Response to the work of Simonds and the rest of the creative team that produces The Sinner has been satisfying. The fact that the Ambrose character has resonated with the audience is what makes Simonds most proud. Season 4, which is set for spring 2021 production in Nova Scotia in lieu of Upstate New York (Covid-caused and pending), will include a spiritual reckoning for Ambrose through his work on a case involving a deceased woman in her twenties. Simonds looks forward to the challenge of continuing the journey for Detective Ambrose and also what the experience of his work on The Sinner might lead to next in his own journey.

“I am very grateful with the opportunity of the show,” he says, “because hopefully I’m now in a different place in my career, and I can think more about what kinds of things I want to do versus will I be able to do it at all. Just reframing that question is a gift.”