Post Mortem: Ripper Street

Post mortem: Ripper Street

It’s become a cliché, but fans of television shows always think they can save their show when cancellation is announced.  For some reasons fans always think they are smarter than network executives.  And they are, by and large, but network executives also have access to information, like detailed ratings, episode budgets, and new pilots in development that make what’s on the air look like My Mother the Car by comparison.

I suppose the first group of fans to try and revive a doomed show were the Trekkies who labored from 1969 until the first Star Trek movie came out in 1979.  But that was a long game, not the kind of “get them to renew the show before the sets are destroyed” that has since been used on numerous shows, mostly SF.  Roswell used bottles of hot sauce, Jericho used peanuts.  Such campaigns usually fail, or at best eke out one more season.

The latest successful campaign to save a TV series took place on the other side of The Pond, where the show Ripper Street had been cancelled after two seasons.  Decisions to cancel shows in England are subject to different forces than in America (the decision to shut down Doctor Who in the 1980’s was just because they were tired of it), and fans of the show successfully lobbied for an additional season, with an on-line petition gaining 40,000 signatures.  Given the events of the finale, we should not expect more (although there are reports of it finding new life on Amazon).  But at least the show got the sendoff it deserved.

Ripper Street took place six months after the reign of terror caused by Jack the Ripper in the Whitechapel district of London.  The police were powerless to stop him, and his just quitting was almost a bigger blow to the constabulary’s pride.  The police force was barely professional at that time (in one episode a detective proposes to a prostitute and she declines because being married to a policeman would lower her social standing) and one man, Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfayden), struggled mightily to restore the citizen’s confidence in the concept of law and order.

Reid was an eminently civilized man willing to do uncivilized things in order to make Whitechapel more civilized. His main associate was Sgt. Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn, also of Game of Thrones), whom Reid could rely on to use his muscle and beat answers out of suspects when Reid’s investigatory skills fell short.  He was also aided by an American doctor named Homer Jackson (Adam Rothberg), a former Pinkerton and a pioneer in the fledgling field of criminal forensics.

In the first episode, a series of brutal murder lead the police to think that the Ripper might be back.  However the culprit turned out to be a wealthy gentleman who acquired one of the world’s first movie cameras and projectors and set about making snuff films.  Ripper Street is a mirror to modern times; if you think people are sick now, you should have been around 150 years ago.

Ripper Street’s third season was daring, set five years after the first two.  The robbery of a train carrying bearer bonds results in the death of 55 people, reuniting Reid, Drake and Jackson (whose estranged wife masterminded the crime).  Also, Reid was reunited with his long-lost daughter Matilda, missing since a boating accident.  The season ended with Reid confronting Jackson’s ex-father-in-law, a wealthy American who owned the bonds that were stolen.  He orders his men to kill Reid, but they are all taken out by Drake and Jackson; they leave the father-in-law locked up in abandoned building project where he will certainly starve to death before being found.

When I watch Ripper Street, I can’t help but think that it is the Koch Brother’s vision of America.  No minimum wage, no OSHA, no impediment to treating human beings like cattle to be exploited.  The Koch Brothers have a fortune worth billions of dollars, yet they have said they feel imposed upon because they had to pay their workers a minimum wage.  In Ripper Street countless lives are ruined in the name of the wealthy having unlimited power to treat people however they wished.  The train robbery that results in a wreck killing 55 people was orchestrated by a train employee who was fired after he injured his shoulder and could no longer pull the train switches; no workers’ comp, no severance package, just unemployment and no hope of another job.

There have been a number of complaints that some of the events depicted in Ripper Street are not strictly (or even remotely) period-authentic.  And I certainly don’t know if common people at the time spoke with such formality.  But it always seemed authentic, and I’m not going to dig up a history book to find out that Jackson’s revolver wasn’t introduced until 1915.

Maybe there will be more Ripper Street, thanks to the profusion of sources for TV shows.  If not, I am happy that the show’s first two seasons got a coda, one that reunited Reid and his daughter and ended with them frolicking happily on a beach.  If any fictional character deserved some happiness, it was Inspector Edmund Reid.