Yahoo Movies The Alienist season 2: Everything you need to know
Netflix and TNT's The Alienist tells the story of Daniel Brühl's Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist who's investigating a never-before-seen ritualistic killer murdering children in New York.
Kreizler is aided by Dakota Fanning's ambitious police secretary/aspiring detective Sarah Howard and Luke Evans' newspaper illustrator John Moore. Together, the gang seek out the murderer via a combined investigation of his mental pathologies and the physical evidence.
A second season of the show was confirmed on August 16 and it will be based on the sequel to the original novel called The Angel of Darkness.
And if The Alienist sounds a bit Victorian True Detective, that's because it is, but here's hoping that its second season will be a better than that show's second run.
The Alienist season 2 release date: When will it be on?
Season two is likely to follow the same pattern as season one – broadcasting weekly on US TV on TNT from January, before landing all-in-one-go on Netflix in the UK a few months later. The cast was certainly pleased with this release structure when the Netflix deal was revealed.
Nothing has been confirmed though, but check back here for whenever we get a confirmed release date.
The Alienist season 2 cast: Who'll be in it?
All of the lead cast from the first season has been confirmed to be coming back, so that's Daniel Brühl as the eponymous Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, Luke Evans as John Moore and Dakota Fanning as Sara Howard.
Douglas Smith should also return, as long as his turn on Big Little Lies season two doesn't keep him too busy, while other stars who could come back include Brian Geraghty as Theodore Roosevelt, Matthew Shear as Lucius Isaacson and Q'orianka Kilcher as Kreizler's mute maid Mary Palmer.
The original novel also featured historical figures like prominent lawyer Clarence Darrow, suffragist and women's rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton and eccentric painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, so we'll wait to see if the show casts those characters for the TV adaptation.
The Alienist season 2 plot: What will it be about?
In the original book series, The Angel of Darkness was set in 1897 – one year after The Alienist – with Sara Howard, now a private detective, seeking out Dr Kreizler's help in finding the kidnapped infant daughter of a visiting Spanish dignitary.
Dr Kreizler reunites with Sara, John Moore and the rest of the original team, with their search for the missing child bringing them into contact with a mysterious woman with a murderous past who is connected to a notorious gang.
It remains to be seen how closely the second season will follow the novel, especially as the first season was shown to have a relevance with the modern age, something Daniel Brühl seemed keen to continue.
"There are issues that have relevance now and that are incredibly current and it was only halfway through the show we realised, unfortunately, how incredibly current and relevant the show feels," Bruhl said. "So, 1896 in New York isn't that far away from what we're living through and experiencing nowadays.
"There's a huge division gap between the very rich and the poor, and sexual harassment, gender issues and the immigrations crisis, and corruption in the police and corruption in politics – it's all still happening, which is sad."
Sara's journey from secretary to investigator explored a lot of very relevant concepts - abuse of power, sexual harassment, suppression of women's voices - and in a post #TimesUp #MeToo world, those are themes we'd expect season two to explore in more depth.
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