 Unsolved cases.
They keep barking at
you from the files.
Like old dogs.
Woof, woof.
 And action.
 The Alienist is about
the first serial killer
profiler, if you will, at
the dawn of the 20th century.
Miss Howard, let me introduce
you to Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.
 I've read your work.
I found it fascinating,
most of it.
 Laszlo Kreizler is a very
deep thinking academic creature.
 Dr. Kreizler is a well
known alienist in the city.
His primary goal is to find
what makes the mind of a killer.
 An alienist believed
that your past experiences
inform your future actions.
 Kreizler explored
the psychology
behind why a killer
chooses his victims
in hopes of stopping him before
he kills more innocent people.
 I'm certain cold-blooded
killers walk among us.
 People in those days
really did not believe
in sciences like psychology.
That unorthodox new
approach scared people.
 Kreizler's idea is we
need to look at context,
a common humanity in
order to understand what
has made this person criminal.
 What makes Kreizler's
theory so controversial
is that he believes all of
us are capable of murder.
 What we are missing,
John, is not how he kills,
but when will he kill again.
 Through the eyes
of the Isaacson's we
witness the birth of forensics.
 The Issacson
brothers are these
revolutionary new detectives.
 We are detectives in the New
York City Police Department.
 We're hip to new
way of catching
a killer with these emerging
theories and technologies.
Ready?
 Ready.
We are solely interested in
employing the scientific method
to looking at crime scenes.
And that is not
an accepted norm.
We found this.
A bloody finger mark on the
back of this time piece.
 A person might as well drop
a monogrammed handkerchief.
 Some of them don't
work, like optography.
That's photographing the eyeball
of a murder victim in hopes
that the last thing they see
will be shown in their eyeball.
You may soon see the man's face.
 Yeah, we go for it.
 What would an alienist
know of science anyway?
 The show is the beginning
of so many different sciences
that we take for
granted nowadays.
 It's really the story of
the shift from the old world
into the new world.
 The Alienist all new
Mondays at 9:00 on TNT.
