The good, gruesome new Brit drama Ripper Street (Saturday, Space, 9 p.m.) is set in 1889 and yet feels both contemporary and very familiar.
For the umpteenth time in movies and TV, we’re taken back to the era of Jack the Ripper – the filthy, teeming streets of London, brothels, bodices and earnest police officers trying to use new technology and forensic evidence to solve crimes.
The sense of the contemporary was emphatic in the opening episode. The setting was the period when Jack the Ripper seemed to have stopped his killing spree, and viewers first saw a ghoulish bit of tourism unfold – people were being led around East London to see the exact spots where the Ripper’s victims were found. At the same time, there was an avid tabloid press competing for new information about the serial killer.
A body was found. It looked like the Ripper’s work, but was it? It was the task of Police Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), his Detective Sergeant Drake (Jerome Flynn from Game of Thrones) and Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), a former Pinkerton detective and U.S. Army surgeon, to determine what was going on.
The seediness and depravity of London during the period was on full display (in the U.K., where Ripper Street has been airing recently on the BBC, there were many complaints from viewers about some gory, blood-soaked scenes), and the series continues to be unafraid to disturb.
The second episode airs on Saturday – you can find the pilot on demand – and it becomes clear that each episode is both an excellent mystery and highlights a key aspect of the period in which it is set. The first episode dwelt much on the arrival of commercial pornography. This one deals with the role of children in the late Victorian period.
READ MORE: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/ripper-street-a-ripping-good-unsettling-yarn/article7861512/
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