Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Alienist’ On TNT, About A Gruesome Murder Spree In 1890s New York

It’s taken 24 years for Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist to come to the screen, and given its subject matter and its late 19th century setting, it’s not hard to figure out why it took so long. Does TNT’s new miniseries do the novel justice?

THE ALIENIST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A police officer walks along a snow-covered bridge. A graphic says “New York City, 1896.” All of a sudden, he sees a hand sticking out of the snow. He looks up, blood drips on his face, and he realizes there’s a body up there. He runs to bang on a pole to call his colleagues for backup.

The Gist: A local boy ends up seeing the body, which was a boy dressed up as a girl, and immediately runs to Dr. Lazlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl), a well known alienist — a late 19th century term for a psychiatrist, given that people with mental illnesses were considered “alienated” from their true selves. He dispatches a helper to get John Moore (Luke Evans), a New York Times illustrator who has helped him out in other cases, and have him go to the crime scene and draw what he sees.

Why send Moore? Because the police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty), has been banned from crime scenes. Moore sees a gruesome sight; the boy, a male prostitute, had his eyes pecked out by birds, among other injuries. When he reports his findings back to Dr. Kreizler, the psychiatrist thinks its the work of a serial killer; this is similar to how another boy who dressed like a girl, a patient of his, was killed.

He needs a file from a previous case; Moore can help him there, as he knows Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), the commissioner’s secretary and the first woman to work for the NYPD. It takes some convincing, but once he shows Sara the illustration of the boy, she knows what she has to do. This leads Dr. Kreizler to exhume the body of the boy in the previous case, without even telling the boy’s mother.

Our Take: Based on a 1994 novel from Caleb Carr, The Alienist is one of those shows where you have to be really into the locale, the time period and the grisly murder story, else it’s just another period drama that will bore you to tears. How many times do we need to see New York in the era where the cops were corrupt, the streets were teeming with mud and horseshit, and everyone spoke in stilted, overly-formal paragraphs?

The first episode of this limited series didn’t do much to take us beyond feeling that we’ve seen all this before. Maybe because there was little action and a lot of talking, maybe because for right now the mystery hasn’t caught our attention, or maybe the character of Dr. Kreizler isn’t compelling enough after the first episode, but there’s nothing pushing us to watch more.

That being said, we would love to see more of Fanning as Sara. Her story is the most interesting part, being a woman in an environment and time period that was not at all welcoming to her gender. There’s a scene where a police captain pees into a bucket in front of her and then turns around. While she is tough enough to make a snarky remark about the size of his manhood, she’s still stressed by the experience. As we’ve been seeing lately, exploring her life would be very relevant for 2018. Maybe there will be a second season about Sara.

Sex and Skin: Moore is an aficionado of New York’s ladies of the evening; when Dr. Kreizler’s errand boy Stevie finds the illustrator, he’s in the company of one of them.

Parting Shot: After chasing someone through an abandoned house and finding an eyeball, he realizes he’s on the murderer’s trail. He tells his maid, Mary Palmer (Q’orianka Kilcher), that he’s going to have to get into this killer’s mind and follow him into the dark areas the killer himself will go into. We see this interspersed with another young male prostitute, dressed in a girl’s nightgown, getting chased through the streets, and approached by what we believe is the killer.

Sleeper Star: We hope to see more of Geraghty as the future president. TR chasing a serial killer would make The Alienist a whole lot more interesting.

Most Pilot-y Line: Just the general bleakness of the first episode made us sleepy.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Life’s too short to slog through yet another show where we examine how hard life was 120 years ago. If the mystery was more interesting, sure. But so far, it isn’t.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

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