8/7/13
Subject Review: Ripper Street, BBC America, Season 1
"It knows what it is and it achieves it well" is a rhetoric that I feel is used a little too liberally these days. With the critical fad of relativism, it's very difficult to criticize a piece of work in relation to it's peers without running into someone sourly bringing up the defense of "it knows what it is and it achieves it well". I've often felt that this blanket defense is often missing the point of many criticisms lobbed at works without any kind of ambition (assuming of course you value criticisms and standards in art... but if you're reading me then you probably do on some level). Criticizing a work for falling short of exploring certain depths isn't a disguised demand to make everything a Emmy-bait show or to make everything "grim and dark". It's a complaint that a lack of ambition (i.e. making something "fun") often results in a complacency with developing characters. Whether successful or unsuccessful, Awards Show bait materials often do allow room for the characters to breath and grow. It's just some are executed poorly and that results in an incredibly dull experience. But this isn't the fault of the ambition itself.
Ripper Street is a great example of how even just a bit of creative ambition in a material that's "not meant to be deep" can be a positive thing. This show is aiming low. It's not a full fledged drama, it's tone is, at times, quite light for it's subject matter (compare this with Copper and you'll see what I mean...), and it branches away from history. This isn't your Downton Abbey and it's going to win no favors in any awards show period. Despite that, the writers performed beyond the call of duty and it's all in the characters. Matthew Macfadyen plays Edmund Reid (who is based on a real person). He is a moral detective who doesn't always play by the rules and has suffered a recent loss of his daughter which haunts him throughout the series. Jerome Flynn plays Bennett Drake and is Reid's deputy (really his sidekick) who is a bit thick and a little too quick to use his fists but is a loyal friend. The final main cast is Adam Rothenberg who plays the American Homer Jackson and hides a dark past from his colleagues.
You might be wondering if I'm messing with you and if I was sarcastic when I praised the show for it's characters. Because these three are quite cliched. To put it mildly. But I'm being completely serious. The show's characters are great even if they seem like completely generic stereotypes. But the beauty of Ripper Street is how it treats and develop its characters. That's where the little bit of creative ambition paid off wonderfully and it made all the difference between this show being a wonderful experience and a boring familiar one. I understand that the characters are very stock from the get go. Believe me I was ready to write this show off myself after the pilot. But many character moments in Ripper Street shine because of how seriously the writers took their world's conflicts. Reid's personal grief over his departed young daughter is handled with such care that I actually found myself invested in a type of character I often scoff at in other shows and movies. Drake also becomes much more than just a loyal friend who follows Reid around. The only character that didn't really pay off for me was Homer Jackson. The twist with his past is actually handled well (which had a really neat duel that was surprisingly restraint) but his arc wasn't great enough for me. He's the only character that didn't really escape his own stereotype.
Ripper Street is fun. It's a show that doesn't take it's premise too seriously but it takes it's characters and their conflicts seriously. That's really the key to writing beyond your material and so many writers forget that the real heart to a story is the characters. You can have fun with a silly premise. You can cut corners with stereotypes. But you can not cut corners with character development and their subsequent conflicts. Ripper Street was clever enough to avoid making that mistake. There's nothing wrong with having fun. But make sure there's more to the story than just that. Ripper Street is criminally underrated.
Rating:
The crime mysteries in this show aren't anything that interesting and the historical inaccuracies (particularly how efficient the forensic police work is...) limit the show in some ways. But the writers handle their characters with cleverness and respect and the overall experience improves greatly from it.
