Taken at face value, it is not immediately clear what The Long Shadow is about. Yet the title of ITV's new true-crime drama was a conscious choice to avoid lending serial killer Peter Sutcliffe any of the sensationalised infamy of the show's initial working title The Yorkshire Ripper.
The seven-part drama instead pulls into focus the long tail of devastation wrought by his crimes on the families of the victims, the survivors and women across the north of England.
Writer George Kay, who counts Lupin and Hijack among his credits, extensively researched the error-laden police manhunt and met with a number of the families of the 13 women killed. The show's executive producer Willow Grylls told Digital Spy and other press that consulting those portrayed or their loved ones was an "incredibly important" part of crafting the show.
"We needed to feel confident that people were happy with the choices that we were making," she said. "But also, for this program to function as a testament to them, we needed to get all the details right. Those people who chose to collaborate with us helped us achieve that."
This consultation process is evident in the immense detail of the show, with true-to-life moments like two of Wilma McCann's children going to wait at the bus stop their mum normally used after she failed to come home or Emily Jackson's son discovering his mother had been a sex worker from the evening news.
"This awful tragedy is one of the biggest crime stories of the last hundred years," Grylls said. "And yet, so often the victims themselves and the families of the victims are just represented in a very simplistic way.
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"It really felt important to redress the balance. It's really easy for us to just be distracted by Peter Sutcliffe the man and lose sight of the emotional tragedy at the heart of this."
Sutcliffe's crimes are undoubtedly still part of our cultural and social history, triggering the Reclaim the Night protests and greater awareness of the sexist assumptions of the age that we're still not wholly rid of. Yet retellings often focus on Sutcliffe himself or the horrific details of his attacks.
As part of The Long Shadow's perspective shift, both of these elements are largely absent. Sutcliffe is played by Mark Stobbart and is only credited with an appearance in two of the episodes. Meanwhile, the attacks themselves are not shown, but hinted at with sensitive storytelling.
In the first episode, when we see Wilma McCann leave through the back gate of her house to avoid the nosy stares of neighbours, her fate is grimly obvious without the need to depict it. Similarly, when Katherine Kelly’s Emily Jackson gets into a nondescript car under the cover of a tree line, the inscrutable shadow cast over the driver's seat is enough to send a chill straight through you.
The show's director Lewis Arnold, fresh off his work on Sherwood and Des, initially considered turning down this project in order to do something lighter, but said he was drawn in by the fresh viewpoint.
In terms of Sutcliffe, it was a matter of deciding how much of his presence was sufficient to tell this version of the story, Arnold said. "There were lots of conversations during the writing about how much and how little you put him in there."
The Long Shadow is anxious to point to its modern-day echoes, as a fairly on-the-nose opening montage of grim 1970s news footage hammers home. But the horrors of Sutcliffe and the misogynistic police investigation are conveyed well enough in the show's raw storytelling, and that's without immortalising him with the twisted notoriety a name like The Yorkshire Ripper does.
The Long Shadow will be available on ITV1 and ITV from 9pm, September 25.
Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
