1. Ripper Street (2012-present)
Downtown Abbey may be as popular in the US as it is over here in the UK, but if you want a really great period drama series, I'd go with
the BBC's
Ripper Street. Set in the Whitechapel area of London, six month's after the Jack The Ripper killings, this is crime drama with a twist - a sort of buddy cop show meets Victorian CSI. The locations are magnificent (the BBC does period drama very well), with Victorian London created in all its grime and majesty. Its not dark and dank as you might imagine, but filled with the bustle of life. Cobbled streets, mills, carriages and period costume are crafted with great attention to detail that you're drawn into the show without trying to adapt to a different time period. Of course we still have the class divides, the most interesting being the differences between the main characters, detectives in Whitechapel and the 'superior' gentlemen police forces of central London, which was something of a surprise. The three central characters are very engaging. Matthew Macfadyen is great as the lead Detective Inspector Edmund Reid. His use of language is astounding, giving the same soft spoken gravitas to his voice as he did as Tom Quinn in
Spooks mixed with an almost poetic Victorian prose. In his long coat and bowler hat he creates a dashing figure as iconic as Sherlock Holmes. Jermome Flynn, enjoying his renaissance as an actor as Bronn in
Games Of Thrones (and thus casting off his dreadful 'Robsom and Jerome' singing duet past) plays a similar character here as Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake. He has the droll humour and rough and readiness of Bronn to play the lighter buddy cop role to Macfadyen's Reid. And finally we have Adam Rothenberg's dashing american Captain Homer Jackson. One for the ladies and protective of Whitechapel's whores he is also a brilliant scientist, performing autopsies in his lab to help solve the crime of the week. The menace of Jack the Ripper hangs over the series, giving the sense that Whitechapel is struggling to move beyond the horrific killings, and it gives a battle trauma edge to Reid, who failed to catch the notorious killer. The 'science' is also brilliant to watch. The third episode was a particular favourite of mind, involving the desperate search for a reason and cure to a spate of poisonings that are killing off the local populace. Its was fascinating the see how far this time had come (microscopes, understanding of bacteria, the autopsies themselves) and yet still have so far to come. I don't know if this show had had any interest in the US, though I have been reliably informed that it on the US version of Netflix. If you haven't seen this show, here in the UK or the US, I thoroughly recommend it. A second series has been commissioned by the BBC for later this year, so there's still time to catch up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnhV5K9F39g