Brits get violent in BBC drama Ripper Street sneak peek

Ripper Street is England's latest TV drama offered to American audiences via BBC America. BBC America used to be reserved on American television for late-night re-runs of Monty Python-esque shows, but with the advent of Downton Abbey, has gained a new place on American TV.

Ripper Street is being advertised as a stylish, gritty, dirty crime drama, set in the late Victorian-era London. It does offer an original take on the crime procedural, which has been a network standby since CSI. The stylization does look suspiciously like something we've seen before -- Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes. The emphasis on the dirtiness and seedy underbelly of such a proper time in English history resonates with the most recent re-telling of Sherlock Holmes. Ripper Street focuses on three London cops, patrolling the Whitechapel area of London where six months before the original five Jack the Ripper murders were committed.

Other main characters include a madam and her number one girl. The crimes the policemen solve often involve gambling, prostitution, and pornography, a burgeoning industry. It does seem to go a step further than Sherlock Holmes with its violence, tending more towards the stylized, bloody violence of Gangs of New York.

Check out this exclusive clip, in which Long Susan (the madam) gets involved with a criminal, Carmichael, in a gambling hall. The first episode premiered on BBC America in December and it returns January 26.