'The Long Shadow' is a Respectful, Slightly Plodding Account of the Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper
Almost everyone has heard of Jack the Ripper, the Victorian murderer who killed five women in the Whitechapel district of London in the late 1800s. But relatively few people probably know much about the notorious killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper, whose name is a nod to the infamous murderer who was never identified or caught. (Unless they watched the recent Netflix documentary about him anyway.) But Sundance Now aims to change all that with its new drama, The Long Shadow, a meticulously researched seven-part series that does its best to honor the lives of this Ripper's victims even as it tells the story of the hunt to bring him to justice and the police incompetence that allowed him to kill freely for so long.
The real Yorkshire Ripper was a man named Peter Sutcliffe, who was convicted of murdering thirteen women and attempting to kill seven others between 1975 and 1980. Like the predecessor whose nickname he shares, Sutcliffe was frequently drawn to both the vulnerability of the sex workers and poor residents of areas in West Yorkshire and Manchester, as well as the perceived police disinterest in the safety of these people. (One of the things this series gets completely, uncomfortably right is how little the investigating officers appeared to value the lives of these women and how blatantly they looked down on the fact that they participated in sex work.)
The story of The Long Shadow begins, like so many crime dramas, with a dead woman and an unsolved murder. But the story that starts with Wilma McCann's (Gemma Laurie's) death will take five years to solve, as the bodies, the questions, and the suspects pile up. But what sets this show apart from its ilk isn't its often painfully bleak and harrowing tone, but its determination to show us each of Sutcliffe's victims — both those who survived and those who did not —as real, three-dimensional people with lives and futures who deserve to be remembered for more than the ways their stories, unfortunately, intersected with a monster's.
