The 'Ridley Road' Trailer Brings a New Fight Against Fascism

For a long time, Masterpiece offerings on PBS could be classified into three categories: lush period pieces, contemporary dramas, and mystery series. But recently, the anthology program has started branching out into genres that aren't generally in its wheelhouse. For example, Around The World In 80 Days was an old fashion action-adventure series; COBRA and Roadkill were political satires. The upcoming Ridley Road is also something that's not typically part of the Masterpiece brand: a period piece suspense thriller.

Thrillers are usually lumped under mysteries, but there are no mysteries about who the bad guys are in Ridley Road. The new series stars Agnes O'Casey as Vivien Epstein, a girl from Manchester who goes undercover into the 1960s NeoNazi movement in the U.K. Though the story is fictionalized, the historical context is accurate. Vivien meets the real-life figures of Colin Jordan (Rory Kinnear), leader of the British Neo-Nazi Movement, and American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell (Stephen Hogan).

Ridley Road is currently filed under drama, and the focus of the original trailer was on the romance that drives Vivien to run away from her sheltered life in a traditional suburban Manchester Jewish family. Faced with an arranged marriage with a local boy from a neighboring Jewish family, she runs away to London to discover why her secret boyfriend, Jack Morris (Tom Varey), has disappeared. She goes undercover in the "62 Group" only to find he is already covertly stationed there. But the new trailer suggests the series is far less romantic-minded and Vivien's games far more dangerous than she expected.