It was only a matter of time before we got another Jack the Ripper spin-off. The sport was to try to guess which genre or genres they were going to try to combine it with this time.
The BBC have obviously racked their brains over this one, and after diligently flicking around a few hundred digital channels, have come up with the franchise’s latest contrived mash-up: Jack the Ripper meets CSI in the Wild West.
With Whitechapel, ITV have also recently had a stab (no pun intended) at Jack. But unlike ITV’s modern-day setting, the Beeb’s version is set in 1889 and miraculously resists the temptation of casting the usually ever-present Phil Davis. Ripper Street is set six months after Jack the Ripper began his gory exploits, and everyone is more than a little jumpy.
The Deadwood-esque Wild West filming style and heavy-handed, discordant music score make Ripper Street feel like a darker, nastier version of Guy Ritchie’s 2009 remake of Sherlock Holmes, and the programme’s brutal, blood-spitting, flesh-ripping visuals would be just as at home in a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Jerome Flynn used to be in pop duo Robson and Jerome. I will never forgive him for that, but I have to admit he is rather good in Ripper Street. As is Matthew Macfadyen as Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, a smart, progressive copper intent on dragging the Met out of the Dark Ages and into the glossy, soft focus crime labs of CSI: Miami.
This unlikely League of Gentlemen is completed by an American surgeon played by Adam Rothenberg – an ex-employee of the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, drafted in, no doubt, to more graphically underline the Wild West parallel.
READ MORE: http://www.squabblebox.co.uk/2013/01/review-ripper-street/
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