What to watch
BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Richard Warlow’s weird and wonderful Victorian melodrama has always been an underrated beast. Yet, without Ripper Street there would be no Tom Hardy in Taboo, no Peaky Blinders slashing their way into our hearts. This final series has already aired on Amazon, who saved the show from extinction and in the process allowed Warlow to head down bolder, less clear-cut paths.
Over the course of five seasons, Ripper Street has moved from being a tawdry crime-story-bythe-numbers into an intense character-driven tale of three men all haunted in their own different ways. One of those men, Jerome Flynn’s Bennet Drake is now dead, gruesomely killed off at the end of the last series, and we open with his funeral, a suitably depressing affair populated by sonorously singing policemen and his grieving wife. Absent entirely are Drake’s companions-in-arms, Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), who are holed up in a sewer with Jackson’s love, Long Susan (Myanna Buring). What follows is a tense, taut game of cat and mouse as our heroes attempt to avoid the long arm of the law they once represented. Sarah Hughes