THE ALIENIST
Airs: Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on TNT
This crime/period drama stars Dakota Fanning, Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans. Adapted from Caleb Carr’s 1994 best seller, The Alienist plops us down in 1896 Manhattan, a town as gloomy, foul and filthy as the Victorian London of Penny Dreadful. Here, though, the monsters aren’t supernatural. Which makes them potentially scarier.
THE RESIDENT
Airs: Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on Fox
This series centers on a young, go-getter doctor (The Good Wife’s Matt Czuchry, middle) with a shady mentor (Bruce Greenwood). Manish Dayal and Emily VanCamp also star. “I never in a million years thought I would be doing a medical drama. It never never really interested me,” VanCamp says. “But this show in particular, it stands for something. It’s exposing a side of the medical system that I don’t think has ever been done before.”