Steven Zaillian’s Ripley takes Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley and slows it down to a crawl — deliberately, and mostly to its benefit. The eight-episode limited series premiered on Netflix on April 4, 2024, after being moved from Showtime in February 2023. It stars Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood and Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf. It is the first adaptation of Highsmith’s novel made as a series, and it won four Primetime Emmy Awards from 14 nominations, plus a Peabody Award. This is a confident, cold piece of television, and it earns its 8.1.
Trailer, via Netflix.
A grifter in 1961 New York
The setup is Highsmith’s, unchanged. Tom Ripley is a down-at-heel con-man in New York in 1961. A wealthy man, unaware of Ripley’s situation, hires him to go to Italy and convince his prodigal son to come home. That son is Dickie Greenleaf, living a comfortable and leisurely life abroad.
What Ripley finds there is not a job. It is a door. The series describes his introduction to Dickie’s life as “the first step into a complex life of deceit, fraud and murder,” and that phrase is the whole arc in miniature. Zaillian wrote and directed the entire thing, which matters: there is no tonal seam between episodes, no handoff between directors with different ideas about what this story is.
Andrew Scott plays the blank
Scott’s Ripley is the reason to watch. The actor has said he approached the role as an act of creation rather than imitation, telling interviewers: “You don’t play the opinions, the previous attitudes that people might have about Tom Ripley … I have to have the courage to create our own version and my own understanding of the character.”
That is a heavy part, and Scott has been plain about the cost. “It was a heavy part to play. I found it mentally and physically really hard,” he said. He called the work of understanding what Ripley does “arduous,” and pointed at the hardest piece: “Certain things I can understand, but other things—it’s actually the blankness that’s sometimes hard to engage with.”
That blankness is the performance. Ripley is not a man with a secret interior. He is a man with a useful absence where an interior should be, and Scott plays the absence rather than filling it.
Fanning and Flynn hold the other end
Dakota Fanning’s Marge Sherwood and Johnny Flynn’s Dickie Greenleaf are the warm bodies in a cold room, and the series needs them to be exactly that. Fanning earned an Emmy nomination for the part. Flynn’s Dickie has to be plausible enough that a stranger would want his life, and he is.
The show’s casting history runs long. Scott was announced in September 2019. Flynn came aboard in January 2020. Fanning was cast in March 2021. Eliot Sumner joined in a recurring role in December 2021. And John Malkovich — who played Ripley himself in the 2002 film Ripley’s Game — was cast as Reeves Minot, a supporting figure from Highsmith’s later Ripley novels. That is a nice piece of lineage, and it is not just a stunt: Malkovich’s presence puts a previous Ripley inside this Ripley’s world.
What the awards actually say
| Category | Result |
|---|---|
| Primetime Emmy nominations | 14 |
| Primetime Emmy wins | 4 |
| Outstanding Directing, Limited or Anthology Series or Movie | Won (Zaillian) |
| Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series | Nominated |
| Acting nominations | Scott and Fanning |
| Peabody Award | Won |
| IMDb score | 8.1/10 |
Four wins from 14 nominations is a strong night, and the directing win is the one that lines up with what the show actually is. Zaillian’s control is the product. The acting nominations for Scott and Fanning confirm where the weight sits.
The numbers behind Ripley
- Premiere date: April 4, 2024
- Finale date: April 4, 2024 (all episodes released at once)
- Network: Netflix (moved from Showtime in February 2023)
- Episodes: 8, one season
- Genre: Drama
- Emmy nominations: 14
- Emmy wins: 4
- IMDb score: 8.1/10
The slowness is the point, until it isn’t
Here is where the paper lands. Ripley is a good show that is occasionally a self-satisfied one. The craftsmanship is real — the writing, the directing, the performances all got the praise they got for a reason — but the series mistakes patience for depth often enough that the middle stretch sags. A con-man story runs on momentum. Ripley deliberately withholds it, and when the withholding works, you feel Ripley’s blankness as a texture rather than a trait. When it doesn’t, you feel the runtime.
The counterargument is that this is the only honest way to adapt this book. Highsmith’s Ripley is not a thriller engine. He is a void that other people keep mistaking for a person, and a version of this story that moves fast would turn him into something he isn’t. Zaillian’s choice to write and direct every episode is what makes that reading coherent rather than an excuse.
What 8.1 buys
So the score is 8.1 out of 10, and that feels right rather than generous. Ripley is not a show you put on. It is a show you submit to. Scott’s performance is the strongest argument for it, and the Emmy for Zaillian’s directing is the strongest argument that the Academy agreed the control was the achievement, not the pace.
The thing worth watching is not the murder. It is the blankness — the part Scott said was hardest to engage with. That is the show’s real subject, and it is the reason Ripley sits above the usual literary adaptation. It takes a character everyone thinks they know and refuses to give him an interior. Most adaptations would flinch. This one doesn’t.
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