Critic Reviews

Even though the case has been settled for almost 40 years — and Sutcliffe died in November — The Ripper is fascinating to us because it will examine the underlying factors that slowed down the investigation, instead of talking about the killer himself.

Interviews with their families and friends, conducted in the ‘70s and recently, further foreground their tragic plights. At the same time, Wood and Vile’s wealth of archival material not only retraces the police’s steps—and reporters’ efforts to cover them—but creates a powerful sense of life in West Yorkshire circa the second half of the ‘70s, when economic hardship led to rising unemployment, infrastructural breakdowns, and an air of modernity fraying at the seams.

It becomes as challenging for the viewer to distinguish between the victims as it did for investigators, and that appears to be by design. But the series nimbly shows how economic despair caused by a rapidly over-industrialized England forced women like McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, and many more into the streets and made them prey to a misogynistic killer. It’s also hard to look away from the trainwreck of miscommunication passing around the police department.

At just four hours, Ripper is a relatively brisk retelling of the case. But it doesn’t achieve anything that Williams’s The Yorkshire Ripper Files didn’t do better. Beyond pandering to a ghoulish fascination with Sutcliffe, there really is little reason for it to exist.

While the series "The Ripper" attempts to dismantle some of that celebrity, instead putting police incompetence in the spotlight, it still neglects to truly center Sutcliffe's victims. Perhaps it's time to retire both the moniker and the same tired retellings of stories where sex workers are portrayed as one-dimensional or culpable in some way for the killer's crimes.