The new Cary Fukunaga–produced series at TNT just picked up its two male leads. Deadline reports that Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans will star in The Alienist, a turn-of-the-20th-century crime drama set in New York City that Fukunaga was originally signed on to direct, but will now executive produce. Brühl will play Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a criminal psychologist specializing in mental pathologies who gets tapped by the city’s police commissioner (a guy named Theodore Roosevelt) to investigate the murders of several young male prostitutes. And after meeting a reporter named John Moore (Evans) at the scene of a crime, the two band together to tackle the savage killings. Given that the show will take place in 1896, we can expect a Knick-esque kind of approach to nascent technologies in service of the narrative that will make us all think, “How did people even get anything done back then?!” as the series promises Moore and Kreizler will use “the emerging disciplines of psychology and early forensic investigation techniques” to track down one of New York’s first serial killers. And since The Knick has sadly left us, we can just pretend that the heroes of Alienist will be sending bodies down the street to the Knickerbocker Hospital for Dr. John Thackery and his wild hair to examine.
