'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.

Rather than show us the grisly specifics of their deaths, The Long Shadow instead chooses to show us the lives of Sutcliffe's victims, from their interests and passions to the holes their absences leave behind in the world. We learn about Willa's death through the eyes of two of her four children, waiting for their mother at a bus stop she'll never return to. We witness Emily Jackson's (Katherine Kelly) decision to become a prostitute to provide for her family — and to prevent the neighbors from realizing how poor they've become — with quietly muted horror and heartbreak. (And no small amount of anger at her husband (Daniel Mays) for refusing to step up.) We're frustrated for Irene Richardson (Molly Vevers) when she just misses a job that might have saved her life. And we grieve with Doreen Hill (Jill Halfpenny) as she mourns the death of her daughter Jacqueline, a girl who did everything right except walk home alone from a meeting at night.

But where the women of The Long Shadow, tragically doomed though many of them may be, are vibrant, interesting figures, the show stumbles when it comes to its portrayal of the revolving door of cops assigned to the case. Don't get me wrong, the actors are across the board great — Toby Jones (Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office) as kindhearted, workaholic DCS Dennis Hoban and David Morrissey (Sherwood) as the overbearing DCS George Oldfield are particular standouts — but the seemingly constant revolving door of officers makes it hard to really care about any of their characters or even really differentiate between most of them. In fact, beyond Hoban, Oldfield, and Lee Ingleby's (The Serpent Queen) DCS Jim Hobson, you'll generally be hard-pressed to retain any of their names, and most are only memorable in the degree of their period-appropriate misogyny and racism.

A squad of similarly non-descript female officers also pop in and out of the story, though most of them seem to exist to do busy work or occasionally risk their own safety by pretending to be prostitutes themselves. Mostly, these women seem to exist to remind us that the late 1970s was a time that was rife with sexism as if we couldn't have guessed that on our own, what with the premise of the whole show being about a man who enjoys killing women. 

At seven episodes, The Long Shadow occasionally feels too long, and its generally workmanlike tone makes it hard to differentiate one episode from another (save for the identities of women who die in each). Despite the sensitive nature with which it handles the individual murders, the show's depiction of the overall investigation at large often comes across as repetitive and plodding. The time jumps do the story no favors, either — the Ripper murders take place over a period of five years, and the show's attempts to delineate the passage of time are fairly clunky. 

Frequently, it seems as though we're just watching the police keep making some variation of the same mistakes over and over again. (And the interoffice wrangling over who should be in charge of the case and how their squabbles are playing out in the media just really isn't as interesting as the show seems to think it is.) 

But, to his credit, The Long Shadow is remarkably unflinching in its portrayal of the various embarrassing and even deadly fumbles made by the police, from Oldfield's fixation on a voice recording that turned out to be a hoax and Hobson's obsession with tire tracks to the simple fact that Sutcliffe was interviewed nine separate times before he was arrested. As the days in the case tick by, they're frequently displayed as text in various wallpapers and decorations along the edges, chronicling the passage of time in a way that compounds the feeling of failure and inevitability rather than instills any sense of urgency. 

But, on some level, it's also apparent that the disdain, damaging assumptions, and general inability to see Sutcliffe's victims as people is the sort of attitude that this show exists to combat, and though it sums up that thesis a bit too tidily via a flash-forward at the end, it's also not wrong. Happily, The Long Shadow very deliberately chooses to minimize the inclusion of Sutcliffe in its story. The murders themselves are never portrayed onscreen, and Sutcliffe himself doesn't show up until the series' sixth episode, and even then only briefly. (One does worry when extended television adaptations like this get made, that it's the killer whose story will get inflated or glamorized. Ripperology is a real thing, after all. In both senses of the world.) But The Long Shadow smartly ignores the drama-bait of depicting any aspect of Sutcliffe's trial, including ending its story by going full circle back to its beginning and letting the final voices we hear be those of family members and survivors.

The Long Shadow is a series that shines in the details and small moments. The quiet subplot that follows survivor Marcella Claxton (Jasmine Lee-Jones), including her yearslong attempts to solve her lingering healthcare problems and secure the victims' compensation the government owed her, deftly illustrates the ways that the Ripper didn't necessarily have to kill his victims to ruin their lives. The public outcry after Jacqueline Hill's death, including a moving Take Back the Night march, offers an uplifting moment of women trying to reclaim their power and agency in a story that features precious little of either.  And despite its occasionally ponderous pace and slightly overlong runtime, these are the moments that prove why telling stories like this is important, monstrous subject matter and all.

The Long Shadow is now streaming on Sundance Now, with new episodes weekly through April 25, 2024.