The Alienist Season 1 Review: Had Potential But Fizzled In The End

TNT's newest original offering just completed it's ten part run. "The Alienist" follows the work of Dr Laszlo Kriezler (played by Daniel Bruhl). He's a 1890's psychologist working in Manhattan. The term "alienist" is a precurser to today's forensic psychologist. It refers to a person who has been "alienated" from their true (non-crazy) nature. The TV show is based on a 1994 novel by Caleb Carr.

Kriezler is joined by New York Times illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans) and Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning). She's a police secretary who may be smarter than her NYPD bosses. The Issacson brothers round out the group. They are Jewish detectives (who have to deal with prejudice in the police department). The group is in search of a child murderer. The police dont care about the victims since they are poor male prostitutes. Our crew uses some cutting edge technology (for then) such as fingerprinting, handwriting analysis and pattern recognition. They also interview a convicted child killer-- but that doesnt go well. Laszlo believes he must think like the killer in order to catch him. Teddy Roosevelt also makes an appearance as a young police commissioner. I'm not sure why. The series would have been just fine without him.

Anywho there are lots of twists and turns (as well as internal squabbles) before they locate the killer. Of course he ends up dead. This upsets Laszlo who really wanted to figure out why the guy did what he did. Maybe next time dude. The ending unfortunately didnt have the punch I was looking for. See my other concerns about the series below.

Grade: 3 1/2 Monsters (out of 5). While I enjoyed the series, it could have been much better with a few changes . The opening episode "The Boy On The Bridge" was a bit of a snooze. There was way too much exposition. Luckily I stuck it out and later episodes were better.

Ten episodes is WAY too long for this material. It should have been five (maybe six) max. Also there's nothing particularly new about this material. We've seen so many serial killer shows previously that's it hard to come up with novel ideas.

We knew the name of the killer several episodes before the finale. That took the suspense out of who they were hunting. Also the final fight with the killer should have been more epic.

On the positive, the acting, costumes and sets were impressive. Too bad all of that couldnt elevate the story.