The Alienist, Period Pieces and the Challenge of Adaptation
The Alienist. Image courtesy of TNT.
My mom recently told me that she was unable to watch Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House because it strayed so far from the source material that it outraged her modesty, irrevocably. I, on the other hand, really liked that series (the awful ending not withstanding) because I’ve never read Shirley Jackson’s novel and therefore I didn’t come in with any preconceived ideas about how it should be adapted. I could evaluate the show on its own merits - and when it worked, it worked wonderfully. Adapting a preexisting property is very tricky. Fans already have an image of the property in their heads, an ideal which the film or television version will never live up to. The material might have aged poorly. The mediums are also different - things that work on the page simply don’t always translate to the screen, and the adapters need to be aware of what can make the transition and what cannot.
The Alienist, TNT’s splashy 2018 production of a 1990s historical novel about a serial killer stalking the streets of 1896 New York while forensic psychology is invented to catch him, has to wrangle with these issues. I’ve never read the novel, but the AV Club’s review of the first season was rather critical, arguing that the show was too loyal to the source material which had aged poorly since 1994 and that it compared unfavorably to Netflix’s Mindhunter, a more complex show with a lot of thematic and tonal similarities. TNT reportedly spent $5 million per episode on the 10-episode series, so they had a lot riding on it. Did the bet pay off?
Free from any baggage about the novel and how it should be adapted, I thoroughly enjoyed the show. The narrative structure is, at times, a little formulaic. But that is the fate of nearly any genre fare. It’s still nowhere near as predictable or lazy as something like Outlander, another big splashy period adaptation masquerading as prestige television. It might have been a good idea to distance itself from the novel’s plot about boy prostitutes. But ultimately the show is about the dark, unknowable contours of the human mind and how forensic pop psychology can be entertainingly deployed to try and analyze it for our entertainment. The Alienist is macabre and moody and pretty weird at times. But it’s also tremendously well-acted and I never thought the dialogue was heavy-handed or too on the nose.
The show is set in 1896, and tells the story of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler - a moodier version of Sherlock Holmes, and a pioneer in the field of forensic psychology - and his quest to catch a serial killer. Partly, he wants to catch the killer to stop him. But mainly he wants to catch him so he can better understand what motivates him and in doing so, Dr. Laszlo hopes to better understand himself and his own dark impulses. Along for the ride are a gaggle of outcasts - a pair of Jewish brothers who are doing cutting edge work in forensics, such as discovering how to use fingerprints to ID suspects; Dakota Fanning as a strong, independent woman who was light years ahead of the shoulder pads craze for ladies office attire; and John Moore, a handsome but indolent member of the upper class who apparently works for the New York Times though we see no actual evidence of this. They are a motley crew, supported by Theodore “Whiskers” Roosevelt who, in this verison of history is a particularly charmless lunk, and together they take on the intractable corruption of the New York City police force.
If you have ever seen a show where detectives, with the odds stacked against them, fight the system and pursue a killer than there is very little that will be new about The Alienist. But even if these kinds of police procedurals don’t offer much in terms of narrative ingenuity, if done well they can still be very enjoyable. And The Alienist does two things really well. First, the period recreation is gorgeous and engrossing. It’s very detailed, and very well-done. Lavish interiors, ball rooms, train cars, dining rooms, even a fully realized opera house interior complete with applauding audience. Dr. Laszlo’s house feels like a real place, lived in, haunted, detached and oddly charming, intimate and somewhat foreboding. The way different locales like New York City, Washington, upstate New York and the Dakotas are given their own unique feel is all beautifully and skillfully done. The production design on this show is exquisite, and it really sucks you into the world of the Gilded Age, with elevated rail ways zooming through tenement apartment blocks and gas street lamps being lit in the Tenderloin.
This helps support the other cool part of the show, which is that it genuinely feels like it has captured a moment in time. It gives the impression of experiencing a slice of history on the screen, and this goes beyond just the rich visual elements and into the more subtle social elements. The show creates its own little world of 1896 New York, and a slice of America - a country on the hop with everything that comes with it. A booming economy, immigration, new technologies, social inequality and racism.
The racial and wealth inequality is sometimes called to the forefront, but often it just exists in the background as an inescapable part of this world that the show is depicting. The police department is dominated by bruiser Irish cops who feel themselves above the law. The Italians in there tenements are brutalized and exploited, already starting to fight back by forming organized gangs. J.P. Morgan and the specter of Wall Street, silently pulling the strings immune from accountability, are never far away. The West exists like an echo, rarely seen in the actual show but its weight always present.
Some critics may have preferred The Alienist delve deeper into these social issues rather than the actual, rather generic, serial killer plot. But I was content to let them drift in the background, filling out the textured reality of the show’s impeccably constructed world. Adaptations are hard, and striking the right balance nearly impossible. But I am a sucker for a good period piece, and on that count this show excelled.
