Jack The Ripper-Television Show Proposal

Pictured above-the corpse of Mary Kelley, as discovered after becomming the fifth, and allegedly last, of the five canonical victims of "Jack The Ripper".

If you read this, consider yourself tagged. I decided to do a dreaded meme, only this one is a bit different from the ordinary. My idea is, see what kind of television show proposals we can all come up with. If you happen to hate television, no excuse. All the more reason for you to develop a proposal which you consider would be above the ordinary fare you usually find.

My idea would not be suitable for the commercial networks, as it would be far too bloody and gruesome. It would be more ideal for HBO or Showtime. Basically, what it would amount to, would be a continuing drama, a serial, in which a reporter for the London Times, one who works out of the London Whitechapel Police Departtment, would become obsessed with investigating the Jack The Ripper murders, in the hopes of being the one who would discover his true identity and thus crack the case.

My character would make a perfect suspect in his own right. His mother was a prostitute, while his father had been a high ranking officer in Scotland Yard who went mad from syphyllus. Yes, he is still alive, and is a suspect. As for the main character, he had been married, but his wife had run out on him, leaving no clue as to where she had gone, or who she had run off with, if anyone. Yet, he had considered their marriage to be a good one, as in flashbacks she seems to have loved him as much as he did her.

Following their split, their teenage son had fallen in with a gang of roughnecks, and is still a continual source of trouble to him.

Then, following the murder of the fourth prostitute, Catherine Eddows, whom he had known well, he becomes more and more obsessed with the killings, and begins investigating.

There are a number of recurring characters. His editor, his contact at the Whitechapel police, a fellow reporter. There are a number of well known characters and others who are vaguely known due to their tentative connections to the Ripper case. For example, Montaque J. Druitt, a barrister and former teacher who had fallen into some kind of trouble due to, it is rumored, an innapropriate sexual contact with a young student.

One of the most important characters will be Mary Jane Kelley, a prostitute who happens to have as her real name the same name that his prostitute friend had often used as an alias. She wonders if she had not been the intended target, as rumors had circulated that it was she who had been arrested prior to the other womans murder.

For the most part, however, most of the characters are random examples of London Whitechapel street life, or middle class businessmen, and prostitutes, etc. Cops, reporters, doctors, craftsmen, ministers. For the most part the kind of seemingly ordinary people that would have gone unnoticed in daily life.

But of course there would be a fair share of well known folks as well who might in some ways come under the umbrella of suspicion. It would be remiss not to include the now infamous painter Walter Sickert, recently accussed by author Patricia Cornwall of having been the Ripper. And so, he would be a regular character as well, along with some of the other suspects that have been identified over the years.

By the end of the first season, it is obvious that one thing is going to happen. Mary Kelley is going to be murdered. And that will take up, in fact, almost the entirety of the last episode, as the main character is laid up in his own bed, shot up with opium by his former runaway wife, whom he has found, and who has now returned in the hopes of robbing him. She has done so, and left, and he tries desperately to pull himself together, as the scenes alternate between his helplessness and the assault of Mary Kelley, by a person whose image we only see from behind, as he suddenly cuts her throat, and then begins to savagely mutilate her, all the while whistling an oddly familiar tune, one we seem to have heard once before, closer toward the beginning of the season. Who was it?

Then, we see him leaving the apartment house of Mary Kelley, and for the first time we see him. We finally learn the identity of Jack The Ripper. Well, this fictitous one, that is, probably an ordinary person that was not well or even slightly known.

The next season, and the last one, would revolve around the main character eventually discovering who it is, and killing him, but in the meantime being unable to gather the evidence to prove the persons guilt.

I got this idea from a conversation a bunch of us were having on The Widows Son's site
The Burning Taper, on a September 22nd post, with some moron called "MySpace Mike", who was obsessed with the idea of some grand Masonic conspiracy. In the course of an extraordinarily long series of copy-and-paste jobs from anti-Masonic sources, he mentioned somewhere the subject of Jack The Ripper, whom some have tied to the Masons, due to some obscure suppossedly Masonic reference left in graffiti on the wall by one of the murder scenes.

I thought, well, that would make a great television series, and for that matter, a great meme.

So there you have it. Come on, everybody, top this one if you can. Let those creative juices flow.