Jack the Ripper has outrun Scotland Yard, a century of Ripperologists and a Michael Caine miniseries. Now he faces his most persistent pursuers yet: the people who made Archer. HBO has handed a two-season order to Merrick & Treves, a half-hour adult animated comedy. It is set inside Queen Victoria’s top-secret Royal Temporal Constabulary, where a team of unlikely heroes shuttles back and forth through time trying to stop the Whitechapel murderer.
The co-creators and executive producers are Adam Reed, creator of Archer and Adult Swim’s Frisky Dingo; Casey Willis, Archer‘s executive producer; and Lucky Yates, the voice of Dr Krieger, owner of the least advisable laboratory in animation. TFC Productions makes the show, with Joel Begleiter executive producing and Kelly Wu as co-executive producer. The trio’s joint statement began politely enough. It then collapsed into the sort of awestruck profanity normally reserved for Sterling Archer discovering an open bar.
The order is a rarer bit of business than it looks. HBO proper, as opposed to its streaming sibling, has barely touched animation in years. Its last cartoon series, Animals, wrapped in 2018. Ordering two seasons of anything up front is also unusual, in an era when most streaming shows are cancelled before the voice cast has finished its first lunch.
Nobody has yet said whether the title refers to Joseph Merrick and Frederick Treves. Merrick was the young man cruelly billed as the Elephant Man, and Treves was the London Hospital surgeon who took him in. Both were living on Whitechapel Road in the autumn of 1888. If the show does mean them, Reed’s team are walking onto ground David Lynch covered with enormous tenderness in 1980, with John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins. Krieger-grade bad taste suits a squad of Victorian time-cops perfectly well. Merrick himself deserves gentler handling, and one hopes the writers behind Archer‘s occasional, unexpectedly moving moments know it.
The time-hopping Ripper hunt has a respectable pedigree. Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979) had Malcolm McDowell’s H.G. Wells chasing David Warner’s Jack to modern San Francisco in Wells’s own machine. Star Trek upgraded him to a disembodied entity called Redjac. Doctor Who settled the matter by letting Madame Vastra eat him, which is one approach to case closure.
There is a structural snag in sending time police after a single suspect: in theory, the case is solved the first time anyone gets it right. Two seasons suggests the Royal Temporal Constabulary will be about as competent as Archer’s own agency, which is to say gloriously, profitably useless. No voice cast or premiere date has been announced. The case has been cold for 138 years, so there’s no great rush.
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