Critic Reviews

Prepare for gullet slicing, blood spurting, cop-versus-cop conflict, and more blood spurting. We can't get enough.

Whitechapel defies the odds, however, rising above its cliches with solid writing, taut direction, evocative cinematography and great performances by Penry-Jones, Davis and Pemberton.

I'm pleased to report that creators/writers Ben Court and Caroline Ip and exec producer Sally Woodward Gentle have tweaked that gimmick ever so slightly, making Whitechapel fresh yet familiar in Season 2.

Whitechapel may not reinvent the police procedural, but it's great fun, and the third episode is a heart-stopping race against time.

[An] evocative six-part crime thriller.

Whitechapel is like a British Criminal Minds, albeit with a much more appealing sense of macabre wit in its appreciation for the history of Grand Guignol.

Whitechapel can be enjoyed for what it is--an excuse to take another bloody stroll down memory lane, while tacking on yet another cinematic addition to the house that Jack built.

Even if it slips into generic tropes here and there, Whitechapel's own veneer of nicely crafted entertainment remains intact.

They [Rupert Penry-Jones and Phil Davis] make an appealing upstairs-downstairs odd couple, even if the nifty concept--studying centuries-ago crimes to help solve contemporary cases--is starting to wear thin.

The revisiting of Ripper lore, though, is relatively painless, especially since the most interesting character in this series is Edward Buchan (Steve Pemberton), the Ripperologist who tips Chandler to the similarities between the then and the now.