After bubbling away in development for a while, crime drama series The Alienist took a leap forward late last year with the addition of Luke Evans and Daniel Brühl in two of the lead roles. The third element of the main triumvirate has now been found, with Dakota Fanning joining the cast.
The show has Jakob Verbruggen and Cary Fukunaga 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, by process of elimination) to secretly investigate the crimes. Fanning will play Sara Howard, a headstrong, smart secretary on Roosevelt's staff who is determined to become the first female police detective in the city and who is part of the team put together by Kreiszler and Moore.
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.
With US basic cable network TNT backing the series alongside Paramount Television and Studio T, it'll kick off shooting soon in Budapest and is aiming to air on TNT before the end of the year. But there's no information yet on any UK broadcast picking it up.