Ripper Street gets a lifeline

Previously-axed UK thriller Ripper Street is getting a second lease of life, after Amazon has backed a plan for it to return to production. The BBC are also contributing to the production costs.

The new series will be shown first on Amazon’s on-demand Prime Instant service which will also re-run the first two series.

Cast members including lead actor Matthew Macfadyen and Jerome Flynn will remain with the series, with filming to resume in May.

Macfadyen, who stars as Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, said: “I was surprised by the decision to cancel it, I think, and slightly dismayed.

“I was just surprised because I think we all felt it had legs, we didn’t feel it was petering out. And then I was delighted by the news.”

Flynn, who plays Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake, said: “I was shocked as well. It was strange though, because I couldn’t believe it was the end. It felt energetically like it was unfinished work.

“We’ve become a really close family, the Ripper Street lot, and it really felt like we had more to do. So I couldn’t take it in and then Amazon came along and it feels right.”

Writer Richard Warlow said: “It’s really exciting from a creative point of view. If you’re writing exclusively for a terrestrial broadcaster there are all sorts of parameters that you have to consider all the time, whereas the opportunities that Amazon are giving us are to make the show that I always imagined from the very beginning – with slightly more bells and whistles actually.

“Series three will start in 1894, and we’re going to have a look at the railways in the first episode. And there is something else which happened in 1894, the Macnaghten Memorandum.”

Ripper Street has aired in Australia on TEN.

Source: Mirror