‘The Long Shadow’: A Serial Killer Series Unlike One You’ve Ever Seen
There are so many serial killer stories because so many men want to kill women, and that fact is at the core of the genre’s latest offering, The Long Shadow, about the true-life slayings of 13 and assault of seven more—not to mention the numerous individuals who were never properly identified as victims—in the North of England between 1975 and 1980. Those crimes were committed by a fiend whom the press dubbed “the Yorkshire Ripper” and who was ultimately revealed to be Peter Sutcliffe. The hunt to identify and capture him forms the narrative backbone of Sundance Now’s seven-part British drama, premiering March 21. Nonetheless, in a way that few likeminded affairs have before it, this engrossing limited series recognizes that such tales are less about their specific fiends and more about ingrained misogyny and the lasting damage it causes women. To that end, its focus remains throughout on its traumatized female characters—at least, when it’s not raking police over the coals for their myriad blinded-by-sexism blunders.
An adaptation of Michael Bilton’s book Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper by writer George Kay (Hijack, Lupin) and director Lewis Arnold, The Long Shadow begins with the 1975 murder in Leeds of 28-year-old Wilma McCann (Gemma Laurie), who leaves her four children home alone at night and is found the next morning in the park behind her house, the victim of a fatal bludgeoning to the back of the head as well as 15 stab wounds. Detective Dennis Hoban (Toby Jones) is assigned to this horrific case, and though most of his colleagues assume that McCann was a prostitute, Hoban deliberately keeps such suggestions out of the papers, instead playing up her status as a single mother whose kids are now orphans. Hoban’s job becomes that much more complicated in short order, when wife and mom Emily Jackson (Katherine Kelly)—who’s turned to prostitution, much to her husband Sydney’s (Daniel Mays) chagrin, to support their clan—is picked up by a client on the street where women of the night ply their trade, and is discovered soon afterwards dead from injuries that resemble those found on McCann.
Hoban follows the leads that he has, be it vehicles spotted in these areas or a boot print found on Jackson’s body, but he finds himself going nowhere fast and The Long Shadow adds to the sense of everyone drowning in quicksand by providing routine text reminders of the numbers of days passed since this killing spree began. As much as it fixates on Hoban and his law enforcement comrades, it spends at least (if not more) time on the Ripper’s victims, detailing their ordeals in order to foreground them as the genuine empathetic centers of attention. Moreover, Kay and Arnold expend considerable sympathetic energy on the countless people (mothers, fathers, children, siblings, and friends) who are left behind to pick up the pieces in the wake of these senseless homicides, replete with close-ups that poignantly capture and commiserate with their suffering.