The first season of HBO's True Detective may have been a grind for director Cary Fukunaga, but clearly it was something he's taken a liking to. The Emmy winner directed every episode of the first season, and while he isn't returning for season two that doesn't mean he's done with series TV. Deadline reports Fukunaga is set to direct an event series based on Caleb Carr's best-selling book, The Alienist.
Adapted by Hossein Amini (Drive) and produced by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), the series is set in 19th century New York and follows a psychologist who teams with a journalist and police commissioner to track down a serial killer. Here's the book synopsis:
The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels.
The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before. and will kill again before the hunt is over.The project will be another collaboration between Fukunaga and Associated Content, having worked together on True Detective and Beasts of No Nation. As for when shooting could begin, that much isn't certain. He's still planning to bring Stephen King's IT to the big screen, as well as Tom Reiss' The Black Count.
