Radio Times: Review by:; Alison Graham

It’s 1889 and the teeming streets of Whitechapel in east London are in tumult; though Jack the Ripper seems to have stopped carving a bloody swathe through the area’s prostitutes, the local population remains febrile and terrified of shadows.

Whitechapel police’s H Division and the decent, clever and level-headed Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) have grown used to the hysteria, so when a woman is found dead and savagely mutilated, they are prepared for the worst. Is Jack back? Reid recruits a dissolute American friend, a former Pinkerton detective, to help in the hunt for the killer.

Richard Warlow’s full-on script, in the first of an eight-part series, and the excellent production design pull us straight into Ripper Street. You can almost smell the stench of a capital groping its way to prosperity after the Industrial Revolution. But it’s a strange thing, a stylised oddity and, oh my,
it’s very kinky.

About this programme

1/8. New series. Thriller following a Victorian police division investigating murders on the blood-stained streets of London's Whitechapel. Matthew Macfadyen stars as DI Edmund Reid, still frustrated by his failure to capture Jack the Ripper six months previously, with Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg as his dedicated team. A young woman is found brutally slain, a crime bearing the hallmarks of the Ripper. Former police boss Frederick Abberline believes the killer is back - but Reid suspects a new evil is at work. Myanna Buring, Amanda Hale and Clive Russell co-star.