SERIES
Despite a talented cast and production team, ‘The Alienist’ adds little new to the genre, writes
Another serial-killer show, yawn
TNT’s 10-episode adaptation of Caleb Carr’s novel of the search for a New York serial killer in the last days of the 19th century is a frustrating, lavish and dark exploration of the Big Apple in its gritty, dirty and dark days. It is executive produced by True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga and features a writing team that includes Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, Munich), writer-director John Sayles (Lone Star, Sunshine State) and Hossein Amini (Wings of the Dove). Daniel Brühl is Dr Lazlo Kreizler — a protopsychologist or “alienist”. The term is taken from the thinking of the time that, as the opening credits inform us, “people suffering from mental illnesses were thought to have been alienated from their true natures. Experts who studied them were therefore known as alienists.” Kreizler is intense, enigmatic and obsessive, haunted by an incident that’s left him with a withered hand. When a killer starts targeting young male prostitutes, Kreizler with newspaper illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans), police secretary Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning) and Jewish twin-brother policemen Marcus and Lucius Isaacson (Douglas Smith and Matthew Shear) are clandestinely elected to investigate by new New York police commissioner and former university classmate of Kreizler’s, Teddy Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty).
Their journey takes them from the slums and tenements to the brothels and the homes of New York’s high-society families. They face their own demons, develop new forensic and investigation techniques and hope to God they find the killer before he finds them.
At a reported production cost of $5-million per episode The Alienist has much visual flair and detailed period recreation to ooh and ahh over. There’s a tense, murky, muddy, otherworldliness that permeates the story. This is very much a piece of Victorian-era noir and while it certainly has some Gothic elements, it’s not a supernatural story. One of its pleasures comes from following the team’s development of early techniques so common to us now but so very modern for their times.
The central team of Brühl, Evans and Fanning work well and their interactions provide for a suitably frustrating but ultimately effective combination. Where things sometimes fall apart is in too many scenes of exposition and on-the-nose explanation that drags the pace and the tension and make what’s going on beneath the smoke and shadows a bit predictable.
Subplots about the threat of Roosevelt’s crack squad to the corrupt relationships established by the police with the elite are tantalising. But these are not fully developed and at times the show can’t decide whether its focus should be on the whodunnit or its political commentary ambitions.
It seems sometimes that the setting of the show (shot in Budapest) threatens to overwhelm the characters. That’s fine for a few episodes but over 10 hours it’s a distraction.
Ultimately The Alienist is a fine-looking, visually intriguing piece of television set in a unique time and place that unfortunately is not much of a genre changer. For an early New York exploration touching on many of the same corrupt relationships and inequalities, Steven Soderbergh’s medical noir The Knick is still a better place to go.
The Alienist has plenty of style but it fails in spite of its grand ambition, talented cast and production team to fulfil its full potential or add much new to the already saturated serialkiller-hunting genre.
●
LThe Alienist is available on Netflix.
Things sometimes fall apart in too many scenes of exposition and explanation