A British, period crime drama that explores the aftermath of the Jack the Ripper killings? Yes, please.
From the BBC:
April 1889 – six months since the last Jack the Ripper killing, East London is emerging into a fragile peace, hopeful that this killer’s reign of terror might at last have run its course. Nowhere is this truer than in the corridors of H Division, the police precinct charged with keeping order in the chaos of Whitechapel. Its men hunted this maniac; and failed to find him.
Ripper Street is their story. A police procedural set in the teeming streets of the East End as it moves into the last decade of the 19th Century. H Division was responsible for policing a relatively small area of just 1¼ square miles, yet into that space were packed some 67,000 people; a seething, bustling mass of the poor and dispossessed.
Between the factories, rookeries, chop shops and pubs that mark out this maelstrom moves Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) – a forward thinking detective haunted by a tragic past mistake. Accompanied by the ever loyal local brawn of Detective Sergeant Bennett Drake (Jerome Flynn) and the mercurial brilliance of the US Army surgeon and one-time Pinkerton detective, Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), Reid seeks to bring justice to a world that is forever on the brink of mayhem.
Ripper Street is a fictionalized trek into the heart of a London borough living in the blood soaked aftermath of that forever anonymous killer. It is an investigative procedural about dedicated policemen for whom life – and crime – go on.
Ripper Street premieres this fall on BBC One – or for those on this side of the pond, January 19 on BBC America.
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