Fans of gritty period crime dramas are running out of time to watch Ripper Street, as the series starring Matthew Macfadyen is leaving Netflix on 26 March after being added to the streamer last year.
The series is set in the East End of London in April 1889, six months after the last Jack the Ripper killing, and it follows the H Division as they are tasked with policing one and a quarter square miles of Whitechapel.
At the centre of the show is Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Macfadyen), a workaholic driven by his failure to capture Jack the Ripper and haunted by the presumed death of his daughter. He's joined by Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn), and Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), a surgeon and former Pinkerton detective carrying a dark secret from his American past.
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Rounding out the core ensemble is Long Susan (MyAnna Buring), a brothel madam with her own complicated ties to Jackson.
The show jumps forward in time with each of its five series, moving from 1889 through to 1897, allowing the show to track how its characters age, fracture, and change against the backdrop of a rapidly modernising but still deeply brutal Victorian London.
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The show was originally broadcast on BBC One in the UK, and has a case-of-the-week format. This, however, is underpinned by the show's long-running personal storylines.
When season one debuted in 2012, reviews were positive. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "Ripper Street boasts superb performances, cast and production values, and, beyond the copycat elements, thoughtfully written scripts loaded with surprises and a compellingly complicated moral base: Virtually all the characters are a credible mix of strengths and flaws."
The Hollywood Reporter specifically called out the lead trio for their "superb" acting, writing: "Ripper Street is a well-acted, well-written and compelling mystery series. And even better, there’s no waiting around, wishing it would improve. It’s alluring from the start."
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Likewise, IGN said: "The chemistry between the three men is palpable, the acting superlative and the seeds of each of their backstories intriguing enough to warrant a consistent week-to-week tune in to see how they unfold."
"It's still bally ridiculous at times, but the visuals, stories and soap are so well defined," wrote The Times.
Similarly, noting the show's melodrama, The Independent said of season two: "It's testament to the richness of Ripper Street's police-procedural-meets-costume-drama premise, not to mention the seediness of the Victorian East End, that the writers are yet to run out of new ideas for gruesome crime plots."
Ripper Street is available to watch on Netflix until 26 March.
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