<i>The Alienist</i> Is the Grisliest Period Drama Yet
TNT’s new prestige series focuses on a doctor using criminal psychology to pursue a serial killer in 1890s New York.
It says something about how fiercely commits to discomfiting its audience that the most disturbing scene in the first two episodes isn’t when the camera disappears inside the darkness of a young boy’s mutilated eye socket, or even when it lingers on the syphilitic sores on the bloodied face of a shrieking asylum inmate. The new TNT series, based on the 1994 bestselling novel by Caleb Carr, is viscerally gruesome (literally visceral, in some cases), portraying a late is a veritable grab bag of triggering visuals and nauseating images.
