The screen artist who wishes to recreate 19th-century England must begin by determining his visual tone. Too gritty, and he will have gone the way of Taboo, the outlandish Tom Hardy melodrama in which all London appeared to have been scraped from the boot of a Cheapside tart. Too clean, and he will have made The Muppet Christmas Carol, which, though superb, is probably unrealistic. Happily, Year of the Rabbit, the new offering from the veteran comedy team of Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley, has hit upon a satisfactory middle ground. Because it gets the teeth and the buildings right (brown and unevenly spaced in both cases), it needn’t suggest that the seat of the empire was nothing but a sunless pool of muck.
Instead, Year of the Rabbit presents a London that is a hurricane of ceaseless action: a tempest of street gangs and freak shows, alehouses and nonstop murder. Stumbling through it all, shoulder against the gale, is Detective Inspector Eli Rabbit, an unorthodox investigator whose faulty heart must frequently be restarted with a punch and whose missing eyebrow was chewed off by a dog last Christmas. Accompanying Rabbit is Detective Sergeant Wilbur Strauss (Freddie Fox), a Cambridge toff who has “only ever read about the East End in pamphlets.” Joining him in short order is trailblazing Sergeant Mabel Wisbech (Susan Wokoma), “a fist with legs” and the adoptive daughter of Rabbit’s superior officer (a delightful Alun Armstrong).
As the trio move through crime-besotted streets, pursuing leads and cracking wise, they seek occasional help from a friendly tavern proprietress (Ann Mitchell) and butt heads with Detective Inspector Tanner (Paul Kaye), Rabbit’s nemesis on the force and the bearer, eventually, of a Phantom of the Opera-style disfigurement. Among the many delights of these jaunts about town is how very Victorian everything is. In the space of three episodes, Rabbit consults the Elephant Man (a scene-stealing David Dawson), confronts a greedy industrialist, and visits a “Charitable Home for the Elderly Unwanted.” While Jack the Ripper is curiously absent from the episodes I screened, one assumes he will eventually make his presence felt too. To leave him out of this ensemble would be, in every sense of the phrase, criminal neglect.
Though series lead Matt Berry is largely unknown to American audiences, Brits have long watched him in such Channel 4 programs as The IT Crowd and Toast of London. Here, as Eli Rabbit, Berry shines, combining the comic timing of Jack Black with the smirking self-regard of Oliver Platt, to name just two actors Berry resembles. Equally good as Rabbit’s junior partners are theater veterans Fox and Wokoma, who gamely change accents, throw punches, and absorb Rabbit’s insults while keeping up a vulgar patter of their own. Even better is Armstrong as Rabbit’s commander and the source of an endless stream of crusty one-liners (e.g., “That’s the trouble with young people. They will keep on being born.”). Indeed, Year of the Rabbit is something of a master class in the assembling of acting talent. From Berry himself down to the man who sells newspapers in an alleyway, every performer is interestingly cast, committed to the bit, and at least intermittently funny.
Yet the greatest strengths of Year of the Rabbit are its pacing and the economy of its storytelling. At a breezy 24 minutes per episode, the series zips along like a wild hare, driven by a percussive soundtrack that will remind many viewers of the 2014 Academy Award winner Birdman. Hustled along by the beat, Rabbit and his partners visit burlesque shows, stalk a mythical “Brick Man,” and infiltrate rival street gangs while trading just enough exposition to string their scenes together and contextualize the next joke. Yes, each episode’s killer is likely to be one of the two or three nonregulars with a speaking part, but solving the case isn’t really the point. Not when the chase itself is such manic, scurrilous fun.
As for the show’s politics, they are admirably muted — in part because the tone is too light to support ideological hectoring, but also because Cecil and Riley have made the admirable decision to ignore actress Susan Wokoma’s race almost entirely (at least in the episodes I watched). Though the world occupied by Wokoma’s Mabel is hardly a paradise of social justice, the show’s writers have given their female lead a gift by not introducing a subject that might have rendered her a one-note collector of grievances. Instead, Mabel is perhaps Year of the Rabbit’s most interesting character: a foul-mouthed softie whose palpable eagerness pairs perfectly with Berry’s hard-bitten detective.
Where Cecil and Riley tread less lightly is on the subject of Mabel’s sex, but even here, the effect is charming rather than irritating. Who could help laughing at Mabel’s quip that “the only opportunity for a young woman in this field is ‘strangled girl in fog’”? Or fail to smirk at her father’s retort that “females can’t be police because males already are. That’s logic”? Watching the back-and-forth between the duo, you’re reminded of both how enduring our social preoccupations are and how language evolves to sharpen those preoccupations’ edges. Goaded by Mabel’s invocation of the “patriarchy,” for example, Armstrong’s chief inspector responds in a fluster that that’s “not even a word.”
What a shock he has coming.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
