TOMATOMETER
AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: The Alienist boats an impressive cast and superb production design, but a sluggish pace and too many tropes keep it from truly standing out in an overcrowded genre.
Episodes
The Alienist: Season 1 Videos
The Alienist: Season 1 Photos
Tv Season Info
Cast
as Dr. Laszlo Kreizler
as John Moore
as Sara Howard
as Theodore Roosevelt
as Marcus Isaacson
as Cyrus
as Mary
as Stevie Taggert
as Lucius Isaacson
News & Interviews for The Alienist: Season 1
Critic Reviews for The Alienist: Season 1
All Critics (70) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (45) | Rotten (25)
Squalor and sleuthing are blended with sadistic verve.
Fanning is strikingly good as Sara, her face radiating an innocent glow as it lifts like a sunflower towards the Doctor.
I found it hugely enjoyable, a quite unexpected treat, a beguiling amalgam of truthfully felt family drama and an exciting sci-fi survival adventure series.
The Alienist spends more time telling you what's going on beneath the surface than allowing for any real depth to emerge.
The result is a series that has all of the brooding intensity of Fukunaga's HBO show, but little of the necessary narrative energy to pull it off.
What must have come to life in the pages of the book struggles to find so much as a spark on the screen -- difficult, admittedly, through the pall of smoke and shadows that tend to choke it.
Audience Reviews for The Alienist: Season 1
From TNT comes the period crime drama The Alienist, a limited series based on a best-selling novel. The story follows a psychologist who puts together a team to investigate a serial killer who's targeting boy prostitutes; meanwhile Commissioner Roosevelt attempts to weed out corruption in the police force, which is trying to cover-up the murders. Starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning, and Ted Levine, the show has a pretty impressive cast. And the production values are incredibly well-done; the costumes, sets, score, etc. However, the tone is a little too gritty and dark in depicting child prostitution and violence. Also, the murder investigations get rather convoluted and are hard to follow at times. One of TNT's most disturbing series, The Alienist seems more interested in pushing the envelope than telling a good story.
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