REVIEW: TNT’s The Alienist Season Premiere

Published on January 22, 2018

by johnadeleon

TNT’s new show The Alienist debuts on Monday, January 22nd and thanks to the kind folks at Turner, I had the opportunity to check out the first couple of episodes!

The show’s debut episode is titled “The Boy On The Bridge.”

Now I know what you’re thinking, the first thought that comes to mind with the title, “The Alienist,” is it has to deal with aliens. persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be alienated from their own true natures, experts who studied them were therefore known as alienists.

A young boy, who also dresses as a girl and is a prostitute is found butchered and missing his eyes on the Williamsburg Bridge, which is also not yet completed. An alienist named Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Bruhl), a newspaper illustrator (Luke Evans), a secretary named Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning) and a police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Geraghty) begin an investigation that is out of the bounds of law to find the serial killer.

You see Laszlo talking to the parents of a young boy who lights fires and also is a bed wetter. He explains he doesn’t cure his patients, he tries to alleviate whatever condition ails them. He is interested in the minds of children and how they work. There’s also the matter of the person who gets incarcerated, but did he commit the murder that he is accused of? He is asked if he committed the crime and responds, “no I didn’t.” The man also talks about being sick, he has cyphilis. He then asks, “doctor, what will take me first, the gallows or the pox?”

Dakota Fanning’s character, Sara Howard, has a job working in a police office. During these times, women didn’t have jobs and specifically in the “ALL BOYS CLUB” police department. She comes from a wealthy family, but is trying to earn respect on her own. She’s important because both the gentlemen come to her for her assistance in “acquiring” a file that they were told wouldn’t be available to them by the police commissioner.