The Alienist 2018
This is a very good but not great tv series based on the very popular novel by Caleb Carr that had millions of us gasping in shock and horror. The story concerns a horrible serial killer (are there any other kind) who spooks and kills among the very rich and very poor of 1896 New York City. His targets are young male prostitutes mainly ones who dress as young girls. That is enough of a plot device or twist to grab us and hold us in our living rooms for 10 episodes. The cast is attractive and fine with Daniel Bruhl as the title Alienist, Luke Evans as a newspaper illustrator and Dakota Fanning as the first woman to work for the police and an assistant to the police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt. Together they form a boy’s adventure team, adult Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew who try to outguess and stop the grisly murders that are piling up like the horse manure in the streets. The calling card of the killer is horrible and graphic, this series doesn’t fool around when it comes to grim and graphic so this is definitely not for the faint of heart. For everyone else this one should keep you guessing and a big draw is the superb production design which pretty much soars and thrills with its details from gaslight street lamps, to cobblestone streets and wide panoramas of the growing city. Everything awful then is still awful today, the corruption, the prejudice, the poverty, the crime, the anger I think this is part of the story that Carr wants to tell, wants to remind us of. Everything is different in Gotham but it’s all the same. The ending seems a little rushed and wish that they had slowed down a bit. The look of the series is dark (in lighting) and fast in action and plot movement. Supposedly a second series based on another Alienist book is on the way. And oh yes I should include the definition of Alienist as it appears at the opening of each episode “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.
