NOTE: This piece was originally published on Critics at Large on March 6, 2013. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
You can’t swing a remote control these days without hitting a period drama. From Downton Abbey, to Mad Men, to Copper, it seems that TV producers and TV audiences are interested in stories that happened ‘back then.’ The dividing line of these period offerings is whether the television produced mobilizes feelings of nostalgia and wants us to long for those times, or whether the stories are told precisely to disturb that warm and fuzzy feeling for the days of hats, cigars, and clear social structures. The new BBC/BBC America co-production, Ripper Street, falls firmly into this second category. The Victorian-era crime drama opens a door into a distinctly gruesome version of Conan Doyle’s London: a re-imagining which upsets and reconfigures our set notions of the past. It is easy to imagine Holmes and Watson moving about in hansom cabs, solving their own mysteries just five urban miles west of Ripper Street's Whitechapel district. Mind you, I was inadvertently well-prepared to imagine just that, having recently finished Anthony Horowitz’s novel The House of Silk, a faithful and gritty take on Conan Doyle’s characters and setting. Horowitz tells a dark story perfectly in sync with the spirit of Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street – both tell period stories geared towards an audience willing to glimpse just a little deeper in the depths of human depravity than previous generations.
The first
narrative innovation of Ripper Street is setting the series six months after
the murder of Jack the Ripper’s last known victim. We enter the scene faced
with the aftermath of those murders, and more importantly, the on-going failure
of the London police to identify and catch Jack. It is less about “Jack”
himself than the effect – both real and imagined – of the man and his crimes,
as if the Ripper had opened a dark door and released a pervasive evil onto the
streets of Whitechapel. This is the context in which we meet our trio of investigators – Detective Inspector
Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen, MI-5, Pride & Prejudice), Sergeant Bennet
Drake (Jerome Flynn, Game of Thrones), and a former Pinkerton agent and
Reid’s de facto medical examiner, the American Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg)
– each haunted by their own dark pasts.
And this
show is not simply a period procedural, or CSI:
Whitechapel as some critics have playfully called it. (Though the image of
Inspector Reid as a late-Victorian Gil Grissom, in a bowler hat, is amusing to
imagine.) If anything, it brings new life to those now-familiar tropes. Without
infrared lights or DNA analysis, its depictions of early forensic science are a
much-needed reminder that it's sharp minds and not technology that really
matters in the end. Whatever its well-honed procedural elements, Ripper Street firmly sets its people,
and its story, in a historical and geographical context. Throughout the first
season Sergeant Drake’s experience as a British soldier in Egypt and the Sudan and
the horrors that he witnessed there invoke the violence that marks the closing
decades of the British Empire. (You have no doubt that whatever horrors meet
him every day as a cop pale next to what’s knocking around inside his head.) There
is also a fairly well-informed and well-written Jewish presence in the series,
a must for any story set in East London of that era. The Jewish characters are
not simply window-dressing in a parade of East End characters; they include
both refugees from recent pogroms in Russia, British Jews of long standing, and
Jewish involvement in the nascent, and often violent, labour movement in
London. (The latter being the primary plot of the show’s sixth episode.)
Miss Goran (Lucy
Cohu), the manager of an explicitly Jewish orphanage in the East End, is a
surprising recurring character throughout the season, as well as a tempting romantic
interest of Reid’s – her keen awareness of the problems of society makes her
one of Reid’s frequent interlocutors. Her Jewishness, however un-religious,
stands in fascinating juxtaposition to the tragedy-induced devotion of Reid’s
wife to her Christian faith and mission.
One of the Ripper Street’s
most articulated themes is controlled chaos, which plays out not only on the
streets but in the souls of almost every character. As each tries to contain
the demons within them, they each, in their own way, struggle to keep the
external beasts at bay: with Reid, Jackson, and Drake at the centre, and Reid’s
wife Emily (Amanda Hale, The Crimson Petal and the White) and Miss Goran
working at the periphery. No-one ever really debates the relative merits of
their differing strategies of containment, but the tension inhabits almost
every scene.
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Jerome Flynn, Matthew Macfadyen and Adam Rothenberg star in Ripper Street |
You can’t swing a remote control these days without hitting a period drama. From Downton Abbey, to Mad Men, to Copper, it seems that TV producers and TV audiences are interested in stories that happened ‘back then.’ The dividing line of these period offerings is whether the television produced mobilizes feelings of nostalgia and wants us to long for those times, or whether the stories are told precisely to disturb that warm and fuzzy feeling for the days of hats, cigars, and clear social structures. The new BBC/BBC America co-production, Ripper Street, falls firmly into this second category. The Victorian-era crime drama opens a door into a distinctly gruesome version of Conan Doyle’s London: a re-imagining which upsets and reconfigures our set notions of the past. It is easy to imagine Holmes and Watson moving about in hansom cabs, solving their own mysteries just five urban miles west of Ripper Street's Whitechapel district. Mind you, I was inadvertently well-prepared to imagine just that, having recently finished Anthony Horowitz’s novel The House of Silk, a faithful and gritty take on Conan Doyle’s characters and setting. Horowitz tells a dark story perfectly in sync with the spirit of Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street – both tell period stories geared towards an audience willing to glimpse just a little deeper in the depths of human depravity than previous generations.
It’s 1889, and London’s
East End is still reeling from the effects of
the grisly Jack the Ripper killings. Jack has gone silent, but the
repercussions of those murders are still emerging: both for a traumatized
population and for the policemen who failed to catch him. Such is the setting
of Ripper Street. And it is gripping stuff.
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Matthew Macfadyen and Jerome Flynn |
Macfadyen’s
Inspector Reid is based on the real detective who headed Whitechapel’s fabled H
Division at the time of the Ripper murders. This is in contrast to most
fictionalized adaptations of the Ripper story, which focus on Scotland Yard’s
Detective Abberline (portrayed here by Clive Russell, and elsewhere by the
likes of Michael Caine, Hugo Weaving, and even Johnny Depp). In Ripper
Street, whatever Detective Abberline may have been prior to the Ripper
investigation, he is the portrait of a tired and perhaps even broken man. Reid
on the other hand is eager to embrace the future, especially if it will keep
him from living in the past. Ripper Street’s
portrayal of its time and the technological innovations of that period
is also
a story about how people meet the future. For all that he has seen,
Inspector
Reid himself still has the enthusiasm of schoolboy for new inventions,
even as those innovations play a dark role in the crimes under his
jurisdiction. This ambivalence comes to a head in the pilot episode,
with Reid
confessing to an evil man (who has been filming a horrific crime with
his
self-designed “moving picture machine”): “Whatever happens,
whatever punishment is seen fit for all this, that
is extraordinary.” You believe him. Reid
can see through the blight and the horror to the future on the other side. As
the series continues, it becomes clear that everything Reid does is a valiant,
if often fruitless, struggle to secure that future for all under his authority.
With a
manner right off the set of Deadwood, and penchant for drugs, gambling,
and whores, Homer Jackson is the explicit enigma of the group. We learn quickly that
he is not quite who he says he is, and that there are unseen depths to his
relationship is with “Long Susan”, the sharp-tongued Madame of a nearby brothel
(portrayed by MyAnna Buring, Downton Abbey). The complicated friendship between Reid and
Jackson is one of the show’s most important relationships, and the plot arc of
the season is designed to deepen and test it. Reid becomes more and more aware
of Jackson’s
checkered past, but continues to trust both the man and his expertise. For all
the intensity of the plots, the relationship between the two characters gives
room for some humour and even playful banter. "This is Captain Jackson,”
Reid says with menace to a recently injured and highly vulnerable suspect in
the second episode. “My surgeon. He is …. American." The moment
produces a quick burst of laughter in the viewer, but it quickly turns far
darker, as Reid orders Jackson to go Jack Bauer on the man in pursuit of some
urgent information. (That perhaps now-clichéd ticking-time-bomb scenario somehow
plays less formulaic and slightly less disturbing across the distance of a
century.)
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Lucy
Cohu as Deborah Goran |
Some people
simply don’t like period pieces, viewing them as, of necessity, precious and
contrived. Ripper Street is not that kind of period piece. It is a story
that uses all the nostalgic tropes to show how they are corrupted. The
excellent writing and cinematography, as well as the skill of the actors,
combine to inspire in the audience the sense of foreboding and imminent chaos felt by the characters. This is the London of Sherlock Holmes, but it is a
new world as well, one full of tragedy, unapologetically evil intent, and often
lacking in justice. I would highly recommend this show to those who are willing
to reconsider a prejudice against period pieces, to those who enjoy period
pieces, and to those viewing couples in search of something that will intrigue
them both.
A BBC/BBC
American co-production, Ripper Street’s 8-episode first season aired on
the BBC and BBC America in January and February, running simultaneously on
Canada’s SPACE channel. The DVD of the show’s first season is being released
next week. Ripper Street will return for a second season in 2014.