'Ripper Street' Series 2 Episode 1 spoiler-free review

CULT BOX
Wednesday, 23 October 2013 16:56
Florence Vincent

In the opening moments of ‘Pure As The Driven’, a policeman is hurled through the first floor window of an East London building and impaled on the iron railings below, and - BAM! - just like that we’re back in the grimy, gritty, glorious action of BBC One’s Victorian crime drama Ripper Street. Meaning, in other words, that it’s time to reach for the smelling salts.

Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and his cronies Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn) and Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) are soon on the case of the impaled bobby, and before long they find themselves in the heart of London’s Chinatown, in search of mysterious beauty Blush Pang. Before the hour is out there has been the discovery of lies, corruption, murder, and a dangerous new drug that looks set to flood London. Oh, and the Elephant Man has popped up for good measure as well.

Not quite as rigorously compelling or charmingly over-the-top as the best episodes of Series 1, ‘Pure As The Driven’ is nonetheless a strong opener, giving us plenty of fun with the Story of the Week and establishing solid series-long strands.

Bennet has a new wife and Jackson is ensconced with Long Susan (MyAnna Buring) once again (with both happy marriages look set for trouble), whilst neither Reid’s wife Emily nor Miss Goren are anywhere to be seen. An enigmatic conversation with Long Susan leads us to believe Reid is up to something untoward, but – as expected – we don’t get many answers in this opening episode.

Despite the rough and tumble approach, there’s a wit and elegance to proceedings. The costumes and sets are brilliant, as is the period dialogue and thrillingly vivid slang. And there’s also the sense that this is a show that wants to give us a bit of everything.



READ MORE HERE: http://www.cultbox.co.uk/reviews/episodes/8240-ripper-street-series-2-episode-1-review

Matthew Macfadyen: Ripper Street Season 1 Review “The Good Of This City” (TV EQUALS)

A metro line is a great equalizer. It breaks down barriers between poor and affluent neighborhoods by allowing the easy movement of all citizens. The Whitechapel metro station was opened in 1876 and connected that beleaguered area to the City of London. For the detectives of Ripper Street, the construction of the new metro line is the scene of a double murder. The only witness is in a state of shock and cannot help them. Thus, Inspector Reid, Drake, and Captain Jackson have to rely instead upon their powers of deduction.

We first meet Lucy, a beautiful young woman in an expensive looking white dress, when she visits Long Susan and asks for a job. She is refused. Shortly after, the police find her wandering the street covered in blood and insensible. Shockingly, people stare at her, but nobody stops to help. She tells the police where she’s been and Reid, Drake and Jackson rush to the scene of the crime.

Watching 19th century police work is always interesting. There are no rubber gloves and no taped off areas. Jackson and Reid piece together the logistics of the murder of Lucy’s mother and a rent collector by examining the blood splatter, bullet holes, and wound trajectory. They determine the rent collector killed the mother, but that a fourth person killed him while Lucy watched. When they find a bullet that ricocheted through this fourth person, you wish they had DNA technology to help solve the crime. But, through old fashioned detective work, they reach the same result that modern technology might have given them. However, their examination of the crime scene by crawling on hands and knees with knives to scrape things is horrifying by modern standards.

Reid eventually determines that Long Susan is the murderer and had killed the man to protect Lucy. In a wonderfully tense moment, Reid sits before Long Susan and conducts a slow pat down. This situation could have been played as a sensual or aggressive confrontation. It was neither. That’s not how we would want to see Reid. Right now, he is quite proper in his demeanor and there is no sense that he can be tempted by anything. The scene plays out without any eroticism or violence and Reid arrests Long Susan. The discovery, though, of her connection to the crime sends Reid into a rage.


READ MORE: http://www.tvequals.com/2013/02/10/ripper-street-season-1-review-the-good-of-this-city/

Ripper Street British Import With Sex and Sleuths By MIKE HALE (NEW YORK TIMES)

Setting a cop show in the slums of East London in 1889 gives you several advantages. Violence, for one: Among the first things we see in “Ripper Street,” a new British drama beginning on Saturday night on BBC America, is an undercover policeman pausing during a bare-knuckle fight to pull an opponent’s tooth out of his hand.


Sex, for another: the two most prominent female characters in the show are prostitutes, or tarts (“taaarts”), in the language of the time. The first episode predictably joins these elements by making a tart the target of violence.

This is not to condemn “Ripper Street,” which has its satisfactions, but to indicate the mind-set at work. As a period police procedural, it’s more successful than “Copper,” set in 1860s New York and also shown on BBC America. But it’s not that much more imaginative; someone wanted a late-Victorian “Law & Order,” and that’s what was delivered.

“Ripper Street” is, however, reasonably clever and sometimes even witty in its depictions of forward-thinking detectives pioneering the forensic methods and investigative procedures that will eventually become the grist for a thousand television shows. And in Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg and particularly Matthew Macfadyen, it has a sharp and appealing group of actors to play its central cop triangle.

The undisputed star of the show is Mr. Macfadyen as Edmund Reid, a detective inspector with crusading instincts who wants both to modernize and to humanize the police force. But he’s not the all-seeing, Holmesian genius so prevalent in current shows, who acts out for 45 minutes before single-handedly solving the mystery.

In a moderately interesting twist, “Ripper Street” splits the glory between Reid and Homer Jackson (Mr. Rothenberg), an American and former Pinkerton agent who has come to London, fleeing some dark secret in his past. Deputized by Reid, Jackson supplies most of the close analysis of fibers, skin and gaping wounds (typically on the bodies of young women, of course) while tweaking the more old-fashioned sensibilities of Reid’s stalwart sergeant, Drake (Mr. Flynn, known here for playing the warrior Bronn in “Game of Thrones”).

The fun of the show comes partly from the interplay among these actors, and partly from the way it juxtaposes the muck and murderousness of the East End shortly after the days of Jack the Ripper (hence the title) with the onset of the modern world.


READ MORE: http://tv.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/arts/television/ripper-street-with-matthew-macfadyen-on-bbc-america.html

TV review: Ripper Street; Neil Armstrong – First Man on the Moon; The Hotel It throws in everything from CSI to Sherlock, but Ripper Street is proper crime drama (GUARDIAN)

Sam Wollaston
The Guardian, Sunday 30 December 2012 17.00 EST

Methodical ... Matthew Macfadyen as DI Edmund Reid in Ripper Street. Photograph: Amanda Searle/BBC/Tiger Aspect

Cor blimey. East London, 1889, ain't no place for no shrinking violet. Well, not according to Ripper Street (BBC1, Sunday). The men are all at the fight (bare–knuckle, naturally) and the women are all on the game, even though it's only a few months since the horribly mutilated body of Jack the Ripper's last victim was found. Suspicion, rumour and terror run in the gutters, along with all the usual Victorian filth.

Then there's blood in the gutters, too. Another body, another young woman, with the Ripper's calling card slices. Is it him – is Jack back?

Sensible, handsome Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) isn't so sure. He's not jumping to any conclusions, nor ruling anything out, just going about the investigation in the methodical, pragmatic way he would any other, pinning photos and stuff up on the blackboard (that's what the police used is it, before they got those transparent screens modern TV detectives have?). Reid calls on a seedy American pal, a former Pinkerton detective who has the combined talents of Grissom and Holmes, for a bit of help with the forensics and the logical reasoning.

It would be easy to be negative about Ripper Street. Do we really need more on a story that's been not just done to death, but then carved up, and had its insides torn out? Why this obsession? You could also be cynical about it more specifically as television. It's manufactured, a hybrid, televisual eugenics: take beautiful period drama, then sex up, literally, with sex; and darken, with nasty dark sex; add CSI, Waking the Dead, Sherlock, a touch of Life on Mars, Garrow's Law … anything that's been done well recently. Perhaps in the next episode there will be a phone vote to decide who goes to the gallows.


But, on the first point, this isn't really about Jack the Ripper – not so far, anyway. It's about the aftermath, it's about a time and a place and a feeling, it's about the police, and the press, and the people, and it's actually about that obsession. And on the other: well, maybe it is a cocktail – but it's a bloody good cocktail. Warlow's/Leveson's script is real, alive and human. It's beautifully performed, and beautiful to look at – stylish, and stylised. The bare-knuckle fight scenes are brutal and memorable. It's proper, character-based crime drama, gripping, and yes – I'm afraid – ripping as well.

READ MORE:http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/dec/30/ripper-street-tv-review