The Victorian detective drama, saved from the axe by Amazon Prime, is back for a third run next week. If the first two episodes are anything to go by, it’s better than ever

Riveting Victorian crime drama Ripper Street was saved from the axe by a rich benefactor earlier this year, and on 14 November, Amazon Prime subscribers will finally get to see series three of the show they couldn’t hang. Viewers of its former home, BBC1, will have to wait until some time in the new year.

Set in London’s fetid East End in the late 19th century, creator Richard Warlow’s stories are not all, as the name suggests, of murdered doxies and fetishised male-on-female violence. The coppers of H Division, played by Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg, are called upon to investigate every kind of crime imaginable against a convincing backdrop of poverty, industrialisation and social change.

We return to Leman Street four years after the end of the last series, and the main players have dispersed. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (Macfadyen), grief-stricken at the loss of his family, has taken a desk job in the archive. Detective Sergeant Drake (Flynn) is rising up the ranks in Manchester, and Captain Jackson is pretty much where we left him, lolling in a bed sheet, searching the night stand for a cigarette.

Former madam Long Susan Hart (MyAnna Buring) is now a woman of considerable fortune at the helm of Obsidian Estates, a burgeoning property empire, assisted by the intensely creepy Mr Capshaw. She also engages in philanthropy with the opening of a clinic for local unfortunates, in which she employs ambitious young doctor Amelia Frayn (Sherlock’s Louise Brealey). And former prostitute Rose Erskine (Charlene McKenna) is now a star of the music hall, settling into the life she had long dreamed of while bouncing up and down on top of some fat old banker.

Episode one grabs your lapels and drags you headlong back into the Whitechapel filth, and within a few short minutes the air is thick with horror and calamity thanks to “an event”. There will be no further elaboration. In episode two, there is a return to that creeping stillness which so infused the first two series, as things begin to get really very dark. Even for a show about such nefarious matters, the writers have found yet deeper recesses in the basement of human depravity. But the awfulness is not put in front of you like a pie on a plate. It hangs in the air and creaks under the floorboards.

The show hangs on its carefully chosen and often filigreed dialogue, and it is that which leads you into the dark corners. Ripper Street is a misleading title when you consider the subtlety involved. In fact, the dialogue is the most striking thing about the show. Where other period dramas seem to spend less and less time actually accepting they’re set in the past, Ripper’s characters sound like Victorians, albeit profoundly poetic and imaginatively dexterous ones. Almost every line contains an original thought, nimbly described. Whatever Warlow and his writing team have planned next, I want to see it.

The new episodes have added bulk, with an extra 10 minutes of material for Amazon viewers to fork down. And the budgets this series clearly top anything the show’s original broadcaster could match. The major event which draws the main characters back together in episode one is nothing short of spectacular. It all feels a little bit bigger, certainly in ambition. With its unexpected revival, Ripper Street has grown broader shoulders and a more confident gait, while retaining the stillness that made it so impressive in the first place.