TNT’s The Alienist opens in New York in 1896, where a killer is murdering boy prostitutes and the police would rather not talk about it. Newly appointed police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has a problem he cannot solve through the usual channels.
So he assembles a team that has no business working a murder case: Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a criminal psychiatrist; John Moore, a newspaper illustrator; and Sara Howard, Roosevelt’s own secretary.
The Alienist, created by Cary Joji Fukunaga and based on Caleb Carr’s 1994 novel, ran for two seasons and 18 episodes. It remains one of the stranger prestige plays of its era — a period crime drama that wants to be a procedural and a social autopsy at the same time. It gets about halfway to both.
Trailer, via TNT.
Roosevelt’s Secret Team
The premise is the show’s best asset. Kreizler is a man of theories in a city that runs on reputation, and the opposition he meets is not the killer but the institution.
Captain Connor and the recently retired Chief Byrnes are more committed to protecting the reputations of New York’s high society than to finding whoever is killing children. The working poor and lower classes distrust the team as outsiders. That is a real conflict, and The Alienist is smart enough to know the murders are the plot but the cover-up is the point.
Daniel Brühl plays Kreizler with a controlled coldness that suits a man who studies minds for a living. Luke Evans is the more conventional lead as Moore, the illustrator who moves between drawing rooms and crime scenes. Dakota Fanning’s Sara Howard is the show’s sharpest instrument, a headstrong secretary who is smarter than most of the men around her and is treated accordingly.
The casting was assembled over months in late 2016 and early 2017, with Brühl and Evans reported first, Fanning added in January 2017, and Brian Geraghty cast as Roosevelt that April.
A City That Would Rather Look Away
The Alienist is at its best when it stays in the muck. The first season is set in 1896, and the show treats the period as a machine for producing victims.
The ten-episode limited series aired on TNT from January 21, 2018, to March 26, 2018. It incorporates both fact and fiction by including historical figures, Roosevelt among them — he held the post of police commissioner from 1895 to 1897. That blend gives the show a texture most crime dramas lack. The murders are fictional. The indifference is not.
Where it stumbles is pacing. Ten episodes is a long time to chase one killer, and the middle stretch sags under the weight of its own atmosphere. The show keeps returning to the same rooms, the same men in the same hats, the same refusal to say the obvious thing out loud. Restraint is a virtue until it becomes a stall.
The Alienist stalls.
Sara Howard Takes Over
The second season is the better one, and it knows it. TNT ordered a sequel series in August 2018 based on Carr’s 1997 follow-up novel The Angel of Darkness.
Titled The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, it premiered on July 19, 2020, and aired through August 9, 2020. A year has passed. Sara has opened a private detective agency. She, Kreizler, and Moore — now a New York Times reporter — team up to find the Spanish consul’s kidnapped infant daughter. The investigation puts them on the path of another elusive killer.
The shift matters. Moving Sara from secretary to agency owner gives the show a second engine, and Dakota Fanning carries it. The season showcases institutional corruption, income inequality, yellow journalism, and the role of women in 1890s society. That is a lot of thesis for eight episodes, and not all of it lands. But the show is finally about something larger than one man’s guilt, and it moves.
Rosy McEwen joins as Libby Hatch, with Melanie Field as Bitsy Sussman, Matthew Shear and Douglas Smith as the twin detective sergeants Lucius and Marcus Isaacson, and Robert Wisdom as Cyrus Montrose. The ensemble is deep and mostly underused.
What the Show Gets Right
The Alienist understands that the 1890s were not quaint. It understands that the people who ran New York protected each other, and that a murdered child from the wrong neighborhood was a paperwork problem. That is the show’s real subject, and when it commits to it, it is compelling.
The problem is that it also wants to be a handsome costume drama, and those two impulses fight. The show lingers on interiors when it should be pressing forward. It trusts Brühl’s stillness more than it should. A crime drama lives on momentum, and The Alienist keeps stopping to admire the furniture.
Still, there is nothing else quite like it in the TNT catalog. A two-season run that starts as a limited series and grows into a larger story about corruption and inequality is an unusual arc, and the second season earns its expansion. The Alienist is not a great show. It is a good one with a great premise, and it never quite closes the gap.
The Numbers
- Score: 6.1 of 10
- Network: TNT
- Seasons: 2
- Episodes: 18
- First aired: January 22, 2018
- Last aired: August 9, 2020
- Season 1 run: January 21, 2018 – March 26, 2018
- Season 2 premiere: July 19, 2020
- Metacritic: 61/100
- Based on: Caleb Carr’s 1994 novel, and the 1997 follow-up The Angel of Darkness
The Alienist earns its 6.1. It is a show with a real idea — that a city’s worst crime is its own indifference — wrapped in a production that is too in love with its own gloom to keep the pressure on. The second season fixes part of that by handing the story to Sara Howard and giving the team a case that touches the institutions they have been fighting all along. The first season is the weaker half, and it is the half most people will start with. Watch it for Fanning and for the premise. Do not expect the pace to match the ambition.
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