Review of the First Episode of ITV's Whitechapel
The Jack the Ripper Copycat Thriller gets an Okay Start
Feb 3, 2009
Jack the Ripper is very easily the most famous serial killer the world has ever seen. Not only did his gruesome murders shock Victorian London but his identity was never discovered by the police and still remains a mystery today. Many people have put forward their own theories and works of fiction have been written with each giving their own conclusion.
But as we will never know man behind he name and the true reason for his spree it’s hard to judge the outcome of each story and a huge amount of creative license is needed to provide the identity of the killer. And so comes Whitechapel, a new three-part ITV drama about a modern day Ripper copycat that gives its own twist on the unsolved case.
A New Spin on the Ripper Murders
In Whitechapel, on the 120th anniversary of the Jack the Ripper murders it turns out that a modern day follower is recreating his attacks right down to the last detail. The show stars Rupert Penry-Jones as DI Joseph Chandler, Phil Davis, who looks remarkably like Gary Busey, as DS Ray Miles and Steve Pemberton as the over-the-top Ripperologist called Edward Buchan who wants to help solve the case.
The first episode started with the death of a young woman who had her throat cut in the yard of a board school and within the next five minutes the Ripperologist turns up at the police station and says that without a doubt the murder was the work of a Jack the Ripper copycat. But it’s not until the death of the second victim that the police are really convinced.
Police Station Packed Full of One-dimensional, Doughnut munching Cops
The cracks started to appear as the show darted through the story at such a breakneck pace there was very little time to use on any real character development. So most of the police station was packed full of one-dimensional, lazy, doughnut munching cops who seem to spend their day sneering at the new guy and acting like school boys, leading to the bigoted assumption that Chandler’s cleanliness obsession must be because he’s gay.
Whitechapel made a great deal out of the contrast between its main two characters, one being a pen pusher with delusions of grandeur who is on the fast-track to a senior position and the other a battle hardened seasoned veteran, to the point where every scene had to have a forced Life On Mars-lite confrontation that soon got very tiring.
Great Visuals and an Eccentric Steve Pemberton
The trump card for Whitechapel was the visuals as the camera effects that linked some of the scenes, with flickering images and cut up frames, looked really good and gave the whole aesthetic of the show a disturbing Se7en edge. The decision to slightly blur much of the gore meant that the viewer has an idea of what is happening without being put of their supper or having the information relayed to them via the cast.
The acting of the leads was promising too as Steve Pemberton obviously had a lot of fun playing such an eccentric man whose motive for helping could be nothing more than play the Ripper angle to drum up book sales, and his performance was the best of the bunch. Not bad considering that the other two stars did a good enough job, even if their dialogue was a little wooden.
Overall the first episode of Whitechapel was okay and certainly showed the beginnings of something that could build to a shock ending and throw another Ripper theory into the hat. But as ever with these murder mystery shows the killer is bound to be somebody we’ve seen before and quite possibly someone who is working on the case. That's not a spoiler, just a theory.
The concluding two parts of Whitechapel are shown on ITV1 on Mondays at 9pm in early February, 2009.
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