Review: TNT’s THE ALIENIST ✭✭✭✩✩
‘In the 19th century, persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be alienated from their own true natures.
Experts who studied them were therefore known as alienists.’
So begins TNT’s period crime drama The Alienist, which arrives overseas as a “Netflix Original Series” — a misleading term I’ve never understood. How is this practice any different to, say, Channel 4 importing Homeland and claiming it’s an “Original Series” of theirs? I’d love to know the legalities.
Disclaimer: These are my impressions of The Alienist after its all-important “pilot”. If you think I’d reappraise the show come the finale, let me know. Without spoiling things.
Based on the bestselling 1994 novel by Caleb Carr, The Alienist is a psychological thriller set in turn-of-the-century New York City. It’s 1896 and a spate of grisly killings are worrying the police, as it seems a killer is targeting boy prostitutes.
The NYPD’s police commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty), five years before his inauguration as President of the United States, enlists the help of psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl) to catch the person responsible for the murders. Kreizler in turn asks for the assistance of newspaper illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans), and both are later joined by Roosevelt’s strong-willed secretary Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning).
Of course, in the late-19th century, terms like “serial killer” and “criminal psychologist” didn’t exist, only arcane ones like “alienist”. Forensics were also in their infancy, meaning many crimes were frankly impossible to solve with any degree of certainty without witnesses.
In the premiere, Moore’s sent to sketch the body of a murdered child found on the in-construction Williamsburg Bridge, holding back the contents of his stomach at the sight of such gruesome injuries, because even crime scene photography wasn’t standardised yet. Kreizler later regrets how Moore’s drawings subconsciously “idealised” what he saw, such is human nature.
It’s taken a long time to bring The Alienist to our screens. The rights to Carr’s book were sold to Paramount before it was published, in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) mania, where gruesome crime procedurals were suddenly a hot commodity.
Had The Alienist been made in the mid-1990s, around the time of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), chances are it would’ve made a huge cultural splash.
Unfortunately, the unique qualities The Alienist possessed in 1994 aren’t as fresh 24 years later. Sadly, this means audiences will think The Alienist has only been made to cash-in on the success of Peaky Blinders, Boardwalk Empire, Penny Dreadful, and Ripper Street — which possibly ripped off The Alienist, as it’s another show about Victorian detectives catching killers in the days before fingerprint analysis. And that’s perhaps true, but only in the sense Paramount finally got The Alienist made because there was a voracious audience for this kind of material again.
It’s what I call the ‘John Carter Effect’: when a pioneering work of literature is adapted for mainstream consumption too late, so most people mistakenly believe it’s a stale imitator. So-called because this happened most notably with Disney live-action take on John Carter (2012), which adapted Edgar Rice Burrough’s revered 1912 novel for the very first time. Unfortunately, the novel had already been the inspiration for the likes of Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and Avatar… so its own movie was seen as being decades behind the curve by the general public.
The Alienist’s first episode often seemed underwhelming and hamstrung by weak dialogue.
Brühl’s a wonderful actor but his character comes saddled with blunt monologues in this opening hour, and for some reason the more interesting Sara Howard (a woman facing extreme sexism while working for the NYPD) gets marginalised in favour of the male actors around her. Ironic, eh?
Fanning does a good job here, nevertheless, and I hope we see more from her perspective throughout the season. If only because the dynamic between Kreizler and Moore feels like a lazy echo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. And that’s a criticism I’m happy to make, because the novel was obviously released decades after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work.
There are some interesting historical details in the premiere, like the involvement of a future President, which is surprisingly based on truth. Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt really did work for the NYPD, and reformed the police force during his time as commissioner between 1895 and 1897.
TNT also have plenty of material to keep them going for a few more seasons, as Carr wrote two sequel books (The Angel of Darkness and Surrender, New York), with two more in the pipeline (The Alienist at Armageddon next year, then The Strange Case of Miss Sarah X).
I wonder if the TNT show will catchup too quickly with Carr’s writing, putting him into a George R.R Martin-style predicament, or if the TV writers will just go off and do their own thing with his characters.
If there’s one thing unequivocally good about The Alienist, it’s the incredible production values and the show’s filmed aesthetic. It’s not a radically different look for a period drama (made today), as it frequently reminded me of Cinemax’s The Knick — which was set only a few years later in New York, too. But it’s undeniably beautiful and oozes with a thick, rich, believable atmospheric. Every episode apparently cost $5 million to produce, and you can certainly tell this is a ‘prestige drama’ in that sense.
The first three instalments are directed by Belgian filmmaker Jakob Verbruggen (The Fall, House of Cards), who stepped in to replace Cary Joji Fukanaga — the man behind True Detective’s excellent first season. Much the same thing happened to Fukunaga with the remake of Stephen King’s It, weirdly. He retains an executive producer credit here.
It was also written by Hossein Amini, a British-Iranian best-known for winning an Academy Award for The Wings of the Dove (1997), and adapting Drive (2011) from the novel by James Sallis. He also wrote the dreadful samurai movie 47 Ronin (2013) and the forgettable Snow White and the Huntsman, but let’s not hold that against him.
The Alienist might not appear to be doing much that’s fresh (but only because it’s arriving decades late to the party it started in book form), but it’s a perfectly enjoyable entry in the ever-popular crime thriller mystery drama.
There are promising signs and moments in this lavish premiere, despite some of the character dynamics and ideas now appearing slightly cliche. But it’s the engaging actors and gorgeous production design, by Mara LePere-Schloop (who recreated old New York in Budapest, Hungary), that ensure this show will beguile you into watching more.
Cast & Crew
writer: Hossein Amini (based on the novel by Caleb Carr).
director: Jakob Verbruggen.
starring: Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, Brian Geraghty, Robert Ray Wisdom, Douglas Smith, Matthew Shear, Q’orianka Kilcher, Matt Lintz & Dakota Fanning.
