Ripper Street on BBC/BBC America

On its schedule, BBC America has given the first episode a TV-MA, so my guess is that the nudity will not be blurred. My feeling is that if something can air at 9pm on BBC One in the UK uncut, then there's no reason BBC America can't do the same at 9pm.

Can't wait for Saturday. Also, tonight BBC America has a new special at 8pm called "Jack The Ripper: Prime Suspect" which looks interesting (I'm thinking of it as a prequel to Saturday's premiere of Ripper Street!).

My bigger concern is whether they will cut it and by how much. I am glad to see it's scheduled for 1:15 if the original was 59 minutes long. I can always zip through the commercials with my DVR.

Some episodes of "The Hour" were obviously cut, but this season at least they did the same thing, schedule them for 1:15.

SMK

Luckily, Ripper Street is in a 75-minute slot, so we should be getting the full episode. However, keep your fingers crossed that enough people tune in, or later episodes could get cut back to fit a 60-minute slot.

The first five episodes of S2 of The Hour, which aired in late November and December in 2012, aired in 75-minute slots (and were the full, original BBC Two version plus commercials), but the S2 finale was cut down to fit a 60-minute slot (from what I saw online, because the ratings were very low, not that the S1 ratings were much better).

I'm glad I found out about this ahead of time -- this was easily the best episode of the series to date, and BBCA's decision to hack 25% of it out is totally inexplicable and calls their judgment into serious question.

The IFC Channel which is on the second tier of Extended Basic here and thus not a premium does not edit their films nor blur nudity. Time for America to grow up.

The Hour airs on BBC America, not Syfy.

BBC America in the past has shown up to 46 minutes of content per hour when airing UK dramas, and for the first 5 episodes of S2 of The Hour, the entire 58-59 minute episode did indeed air in a 75-minute slot. When BBC America gives a show an extended slot, the show airs in its full UK version (typically 57-59 minutes) plus commercials, so I'm confident Ripper Street will be the full UK version on Saturday night.

I am sorry to hear that the last episode of season 2 of the Hour was chopped. So far we've watched the first two episodes and have enjoyed them tremendously. I wonder now if I should wait for the DVD to watch the last episode in its entirety.

Also, people have been questioning whether BBC A will show any nudity. I can tell you that the mild "pornographic" pictures that have been the center of the story so far with season 2 of the Hour have been blurred so that you can't see any detail.

I doubt there will be any nudity shown on Ripper Street.

SMK

Agreed. Even the edgy-channels such as FX don't show full nudity(anymore). It is usually a buttock, and it is usually male.
The most you'll see otherwise is a side-boob.

It's all Janet Jackson's fault. (Completely serious.) Ever since that "wardrobe malfunction", even medical shows started optically censoring content they didn't in the past.

Mrvideo, BBCA will most likely spread out the 15-16 minutes of commercials over 5 breaks of roughly 3 minutes each, which is what they did for The Hour. The last 3-minute break usually started just after 10pm.

The BBCA broadcast ran 55 minutes without commercials, so 4.5 minutes was edited for time. No language was edited (several instances of the s-word were left intact), but boobs were blurred (rear nudity in photographs was not censored, however).

So i guess the BBCA "rule" is that a 60-minute BBC show in an 80-minute slot, like the Doctor Who Christmas special or the upcoming season of Top Gear, is full length, but in a 75-minute slot about 4-5 minutes is edited for time.

Overall, I enjoyed the premiere, and the episode felt complete, even though 4.5 minutes was cut. I'd be interested to know what was cut - when BBCA aired Torchwood S1 and S2, about 4 minutes was cut per episode to fit a 60-minute slot, but from watching the DVDs later, most of this time was establishing/lingering shots of a location, whose absence wasn't really noticed.

Looking forward to next week.

They have a problem showing boobs but no problems showing blood and guts. How backward! Interesting premise in the series on what drove early filmmaking.

Clearly, unlike blood & guts, the sight of bare female boobs could wreck severe long-term psychological damage on any formative young mind [or calcified Puritan mind] that happens to catch a glimpse. How thankful we are that the censors, network brass, and FCC are all on the job looking out for our moral and emotional well-being. For the children [and the childish], you know.

Well, wifey and I enjoyed the first season tremendously, had high hopes for the second, but it simply didn't seem to be as engaging. "The Hour" is still quite a bit better than most TV shows, but the switch from spies to "the mob" and the changes they made to Freddy seemed to have taken the show down a notch, IMO.

I loved the first episode of Ripper Street. I have admired Matthew Macfadyen ever since his MI5 days. Compared to the other BBCA 19 Century police procedural, Copper, Ripper Street is in a class by itself. Both the show's writing and performances are head and shoulders better that Copper's. Faint praise though that may be, I think that Ripper Street is off to a terrific start and look forward to seeing more.

FWIW, the Canadian broadcast did not blur any nudity.

And yes, the premiere has earned the show future viewings until the writing declines.

Tony

+1 to both. MI5 was a fantastic series.
but I did also like Copper

RS seemed more fast paced & much quicker dialog exchanges than Copper, not sure that's always a good thing but I'm in for Ripper St has lots of potential for a good run.

Copper looked and sounded great. On that score it was better than Ripper Street and I stuck with it for the entire season. Still, Copper's writing was leaden and its performances unconvincing. It's star, Tom Weston-Jones, seemed to me not to be up to his role. On the other hand, I thought both Anastasia Griffith and Franka Potente were unconvincing too, although I know they can act. Thus, I suspect that the disappointing performances of all three may have been more the result of bad writing than a lack of talent.

In stark contrast to Copper, I thought the dialog crackled in Ripper Street. In addition to Matthew Macfayden's impressive performance as DI Reid, I also liked his mordant doctor friend and the little brothel madam. If Ripper Street maintains the quality I saw in the first episode, it could be a terrific series.

That could be true. I've always suspected they edit it out so viewers have a reason to buy the bluray/.dvd. Just cynical, I guess.

A bit off-topic---Sometime back in the 70s or 80s our local NBC affilliate here in Fresno CA (Think Utah transplanted to the middle of california) changed ownership.
As a sort of celebration the new management ran the movie The Deerhunter during prime time instead of whatever was on the network. To my astonishment it was totally uncut and unedited with multiple F-bombs intact. I immediately called the station with my congratulations!

The 9pm series premiere of Ripper Street on BBC America had 0.552 million viewers, which should please the channel. Here are some other recent BBC America ratings for comparison:

Copper - S1 average was 0.692 million (premiere had 1.107 million, season finale had 0.523 million)
Doctor Who - S7.1 average was 1.182 million (5 episodes + Christmas special)
Top Gear - S18 average was about 0.5 million
Being Human - past seasons averaged about 0.3 million
Bedlam - the three S2 episodes that aired in primetime averaged about 0.1 million (after 3 episodes, it aired only at midnight Saturday)

So not as popular as Doctor Who (not that BBC America expected over 1 million, I'd guess), but in line with Copper and Top Gear, two other series the channel would classify as "hits," and better than other Saturday night series (like Being Human and Bedlam).

Here's hoping many of those viewers tune in this Saturday!

I think it's safe to say that network executives aren't that clever to think that far ahead.

Long term thinking hasn't happened with corporations since Apple bought the PARC OS from Xerox - right about the time IBM went all in on OS2 and open hardware and showed that companies can get too big to see the mountain they're about to crash into. Apple then crashed into its own mountain when they foolishly dumped Steve Jobs and spent a decade making miserable clones of its products and nearly disappeared from existence.

Now days, companies don't think any further ahead than the quarterly stock reports.

One of the worst decisions most companies make now is going public if they don't need the funding. Mark down Facebook as the latest example of that. Many great companies have been ruined by having to appease kindergarten level stock trading instead of growing the business.
Edited by NetworkTV - 1/24/13 at 7:25am

Enjoyed the 2nd episode. Like the Inspector & Sergeant. Interesting mystery backstory developing on the whoring "CSI" guy and his blonde madam associate.

How did CSI know where to send Fagin and his hordes to find the boy. Didn't know he knew where the Inspector was. I must have missed something.

[quote name="philw1776" url="/t/1452225/ripper-street-on-bbc-bbc-america#post_22884490"How did CSI know where to send Fagin and his hordes to find the boy. Didn't know he knew where the Inspector was. I must have missed something.[/quote]

He was in the hallway waiting when they discovered the boy was Jewish

BBC America and BBC UK announced yesterday that Ripper Street has been renewed for an 8-episode second season, which will premiere in 2014. Hooray!

Hooray, indeed! I enjoyed both of the first two Ripper Street episodes and want to see more so the news of the show's renewal for a second season is icing on the cake. The writing of the first two episodes was outstanding.