‘The Alienist’, Hurray for Hollywood! (it’s a living)

Despite being set in New York at the turn of the 20^th cen­tu­ry and being filmed in Budapest, The Alienist boasts a pletho­ra of Irish tal­ent. Amongst the cast we find David Wilmot, Michael McEl­hat­ton, Peter Coo­nan, Gavin O’Connor, Sean McGin­ley, Mau­rice Byrne and Paul Reid. The prin­ci­ple direc­tors of pho­tog­ra­phy are Cathal Wat­ters and PJ Dil­lon, Der­mot Diskin edits and Philip Mur­phy is on set décor. 

Much of that is thanks to the arrival of Stu­art Car­olan and David Caf­frey. Car­olan was brought in as show run­ner in 2020 for sea­son 2, and asked Caf­frey to direct many of those sea­son 2 episodes for him. 

Get­ting work in Ire­land on film and tele­vi­sion is, to put it mild­ly, a pre­car­i­ous pur­suit. One pro­duc­er once summed it up mem­o­rably to me when he said, striv­ing to get a project off the ground in Ire­land was like “try­ing to fuck smoke”. 

And you learn very ear­ly on that what sem­blance of sta­bil­i­ty there exists is to be found in tele­vi­sion. And, very quick­ly, what you real­ly hope for are the reg­u­lar pay­ments that a series can pro­vide you with. 

You don’t just get paid for a num­ber of episodes. Thanks to the vigour of the mus­cu­lar unions, you also have to get paid out for any pos­si­ble repeat screen­ings, often in mul­ti­ple ter­ri­to­ries and on dif­fer­ent platforms.

All of which means that what you secret­ly dream of more than any­thing else is get­ting that call up for a Hol­ly­wood series. So it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that Car­olan should have leapt at the chance to join the Alienist as show run­ner, albeit for sea­son 2. 

After all, with around $5 mil­lion per episode, he had con­sid­er­ably more mon­ey for each indi­vid­ual episode than he did for an entire sea­son of Love/Hate, an episode of which was said to have cost around €600,000. 

Just to put all this in per­spec­tive. Every sin­gle one of the cast and crew would have greet­ed those five sea­sons of Love/Hate, with  €600,000 an episode(!), as all of their Christ­mases com­ing at once. 

The fact that, once it got over its teething prob­lems in sea­son 1, Love/Hate then evolved into one of the most excit­ing and dra­mat­i­cal­ly taut series ever broad­cast on Irish tele­vi­sion was very much but an added bonus.

So the prospect of join­ing a bona fide $5m an episode, prime time Hol­ly­wood dra­ma series — $5m an episode! — would, lit­er­al­ly, have been a dream come true for cast and crew alike. And it’s gen­uine­ly thrilling to see so many seri­ous­ly gift­ed actors and film mak­ers involved in such an opu­lent affair. The end prod­uct is very much nei­ther here nor there.

And, in fair­ness, sea­son 2 of the Alienist is no worse than sea­son 1 was. The open­ing episode of that first sea­son looked like a very ear­ly draft of the first assign­ment of a 1^st year film stu­dent after spend­ing his very first week­end watch­ing noth­ing but Michael Cimi­no films. Well, specif­i­cal­ly, a Cimi­no film — see my ear­li­er review of Heaven’s Gate here.

It’s all so busy. There’s stuff every­where, And you keep wait­ing for it to take that final step from just plain bad to so-bad-it’s‑good. But, for what­ev­er alchem­i­cal rea­son, it some­how fails to ever make that tri­umphant tran­si­tion from pants to kitsch and camp.

Nev­er mind. It’s fan­tas­tic to see so many tal­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als so gain­ful­ly employed, and I very much hope that sea­son 3 gets giv­en the green light. After which, I’d love to then see them all get their teeth into some­thing with a lit­tle bit more bite.

You can see the trail­er for sea­son 2 of The Alienist here.

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