The hunt for serial killers is seemingly an obsession for TV – crime is everywhere, and just this past weekend we had the first trailer for David Fincher's Netflix series Mindhunter. A new look is online for a series that delves back even further into the past of the psychological forensic sciences, and you can see Luke Evans, Daniel Brühl and Dakota Fanning starring in the new trailer for The Alienist.
This one has director Jakob Verbruggen and executive producer Cary Fukunaga (who was originally going to direct) overseeing an adaptation of Caleb Carr's crime-focused best-seller. Set in a flourishing, Gilded Age New York City of 1896, the period is one of great technological innovation, huge wealth and poverty that is just as extreme. When a string of young male prostitutes are murdered in bloody fashion, police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (yes, the one who would go on to become the 26th US President) brings in criminal psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreiszler (Brühl) and newspaper reporter John Moore (Evans) to secretly investigate the crimes. They have help from a makeshift team, including Sara Howard (Fanning), a secretary on Roosevelt's staff who is determined to become the first female police detective in the city.
Together with early psychological tools and emerging forensic science, they dig into the mysteries. The title, in case you were wondering is a term for one who studies mental pathologies. In this case, Brühl's Kreiszler, a man who in true narrative fashion, is also trying to investigate his own demons.
The Alienist will be available to US viewers via TNT on 22 January next year, and Netflix has the rights to the show in the UK.