TNT is set to take another dark trip down the sidewalks of New York.
The cable network has released a trailer for the second season of its historical detective show, The Alienist, which will adapt 1997's The Angel of Darkness, the second novel in Caleb Carr’s book series set in 1890s New York City. The new season is set to premiere on July 26.
The show follows brilliant psychiatrist Laszlo Kreizler (Inglourious Basterds’ Daniel Brühl), journalist John Schuyler Moore (Beauty and the Beast’s Luke Evans), and investigator Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning) as they work to solve crimes in Gilded Age New York. Its first season, which aired in 2018, adapted the first book in Carr’s series, the 1994 New York Times bestseller The Alienist, in which the investigators tracked down a serial murderer of young boys.
Both novels feature appearances by several prominent real-life figures of the era, including Theodore Roosevelt, who was New York City’s police commissioner at the time. It’s unclear if Roosevelt will appear in the new season of the show; in the first, he was portrayed by The Hurt Locker’s Brian Geraghty.
In the original novel, the mystery involves the kidnapping of a Spanish diplomat’s baby, suspected to have been carried out by a gang-connected nurse who may have murdered her own kids in the past. The story’s narrator is Kreizler’s assistant, Stevie Taggart, who has a colorful manner of expressing himself that may not be to every reader's taste (“There’s likely some polished way of starting a story like this, a clever bit of gaming that would sucker people in surer than the best banco feeler in town”). This choice gives the book a much different tone than The Alienist’s, whose story is told by the serious, much less slangy Moore. The TV series, judging by the trailer, fortunately appears to stick with a darker and grimmer feel.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
