The Alienist is a drama television series broadcasting on TNT beginning in January 2018 in the United States and on Netflix in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Based on the 1994 novel written by Caleb Carr, it stars Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning.
New York City, 1896. The city is expanding under a new wave of immigration. Poverty and street crime are rampant, and no less rampant is police corruption. The newly-appointed Commissioner, one Theodore Roosevelt, strives to clean up the police department, navigating a minefield of crooked cops, corrupt politicians, and decadent aristocrats. Meanwhile, the Alienist Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl) practices his emerging field of medicine with troubled children, and freelance artist and notorious cad John Schuyler Moore (Evans) drinks and whores his way through high society.
In the midst of all this, a heinous crime is discovered. A young boy is found murdered, his body horribly mutilated. The scandalous and unusual details of the crime - the boy was a prostitute who would dress like a girl, he was sexually assaulted and his body was left on a barely-accessible rooftop - get Kreizler's attention. He theorizes that this is a new kind of criminal: a serial killer. Whoever killed this boy will kill again, and he must be found before that. But the case is so disturbing and unseemly that the regular police are content to simply sweep this thing under the rug, and Roosevelt already has his hands full with everything else going on, so the investigation must be done discreetly, and out of sight of the regular department. With Roosevelt's tacit approval, Kreizler assembles a team consisting of his friend Moore, Roosevelt's secretary Sara Howard (Fanning), and two young detectives who dabble in the new science of forensics. They plunge into the investigation, trying to determine who this killer is, why he's killing, and how to stop him from killing again.
As a miniseries adaptation of a novel, the story is expanded significantly from the source material, exploring some elements in more detail that were present in the background of the book: classism and racism in 19th Century America, and some exploration into gender identity issues.
A second season, titled The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, premiered on July 19, 2020.