TV continues to lure actors who have been spending time on film work like moths to a flame. The latest two heading for the small screen are Luke Evans and Daniel Brühl, who will lead the cast of The Alienist for US cable network TNT.
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. They have help from a makeshift team, including Sara Howard, 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 series is gearing up to shoot in Budapest early next year and should be on US screens later in 2017. We'll have to wait and see whether a UK channel picks it up, but given this first burst of casting news, it seems likely.