Alienist Books News

The Alienist at Turner Upfront

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The Turner Upfront presentation for 2016-17 held in Madison Square Garden earlier this week included a teaser for TNT’s upcoming adaptation of The Alienist. According to Deadline, the President of TBS and TNT and Chief Content Officer for Turner Entertainment, Kevin Reilly, who is apparently “a huge fan of the book,” has promised that the TV series “will be marquee programming.”

Although several other trailers have since appeared on TNT’s YouTube channel, the teaser for The Alienist does not appear to have been released online yet. However, the few comments I was able to locate on Twitter from various members of the entertainment press in response to the teaser for The Alienist were positive. Diane Gordon, freelance event reporter for Variety and New York Magazine, described the teaser for the series as having “great production value,” while Michael Schneider, executive editor for Indiewire, revealed that ten scripts for The Alienist have now been finished, and casting is underway.

The Alienist TV Series: No Longer Shooting In Montreal

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Earlier this month it was reported on The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) Montreal website that The Alienist TV series would be shooting in Montreal this summer. On Wednesday of last week, however, Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva reported that, “The Quebec city [Montreal] is losing two American series to New York, as I hear TNT’s straight-to-series The Alienist also recently decided to relocate.”

At this stage, I have been unable to find another source to confirm the report that shooting has moved to New York City. Nonetheless, the series is no longer listed on ACTRA Montreal “What’s Shooting” pre-production list, so at the very least it appears to have been confirmed that shooting has moved from Montreal. It would certainly be exciting to hear that the production has moved to New York — after all, many of the book’s settings still exist, as 17th Street’s maps of Alienist locations demonstrate — so as more news comes to light about this development, it will be reported here.

Third And Fourth Alienist Novel Announced!

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In an exclusive with Entertainment Weekly, it was revealed this morning that Caleb Carr will be returning to the Alienist series. Mulholland Books have announced that they will be publishing two new Alienist novels that will act as ‘bookends’ for the two current novels in the series, The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness.

The first of the two new novels will be set 18 years after The Angel of Darkness, in New York City of 1915. Josh Kendall, VP, Executive Editor, and Editorial Director of Mulholland Books explained that this book, “set against a stage of rising nationalist violence and the early spy state,” is “centered on nativist violence and terrorism during America’s involvement in World War I.”

The second of the novels will take us back in time again, presumably to the late 1870s or early 1880s (assuming the events in the summary from the publisher’s press release matches the timeline already established in the series so far). In this novel, titled The Strange Case of Miss Sara X, “a youthful Kreizler, after finishing his psychology training at Harvard, falls under the spell of William James, has his first run-in with Roosevelt, and delves into the secret life of Sara Howard, heroine of the first books.”

For those of us who have wondered if there would ever be a third novel, official confirmation of two new Alienist novels is something to be excited about! However, the wait need not be arduous; we are also lucky enough to have Caleb Carr’s upcoming contemporary thriller Surrender, New York to look forward to! If you haven’t already done so, I recommend reading more about the novel and pre-order before its release on August 23.

The Alienist TV Series: Shooting in Montreal this Summer

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The Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) Montreal has listed The Alienist TV series on their “What’s Shooting” pre-production list, indicating that Montreal will be getting transformed into 1896 New York City for the series. The listing also indicates that shooting will be taking place in summer this year. While this is clearly an interesting development, it is not altogether unexpected: Montreal has doubled as New York City in a number of films recently, including Brooklyn (2015) and The Walk (2015). You can see the Québec Film and Television Council photos offering Montreal as a shooting location to represent early 20th century New York City here.

Wherever and whenever they are shooting, let’s hope that the script is being reworked before it takes place. For any Alienist readers who did not see the post about the audition recordings surfacing, the excerpts revealed that significant changes were made in the scenes read during casting, both to the characters and the plot. To learn more, you can view the original post here.