After being raped in an unprovoked attack, Jamie vows to transform himself into a hyper-masculine “real man” with disastrous and hilarious consequences in order to come to overcome his trauma.

SYNOPSIS:

RIPPED is a comedy-drama serial which exposes the national crisis in masculinity, the stigma attached to male rape and explores the current epidemic in male violence.

Jamie (23) begins the series as a teetotal, shy, timid character; his baggy clothes and long hair hiding him from a world he can’t quite fit into. Advertisements taunt him; people mock him; even his own Dad - “when I was your age, I was out on the piss or feeling up a different bird at the cinema every weekend. Not cooped up in some dingy flat with a little nancy boy.” That nancy boy is Jamie’s gay best friend, Sam (23), who once had a trial shift at Claire’s Accessories but got fired for piercing a little girl’s ears without training. Even he appears more of a real man than Jamie.

The opening episode establishes the warm, unique friendship between Jamie and Sam - two best friends who hibernating from a confusing world with movies and Jaffa Cakes. But, when Jamie is raped in an unprovoked attack while walking home, the narrative shifts into dark, emotional territory. Jamie blames himself for being targeted, his relationship with Sam, and that he couldn’t fight back. In a state of trauma, shock and desperation, he abandons Sam, changes his name to the more masculine Jack and begins a dramatic transformation to prove to himself, his Dad and the entire world that he is a real man. Over the series, we witness Jamie’s complete physical and emotional transition. He shaves his head, pumps himself with steroids, learns how to fight, sniffs gear, downs a pint, shouts at football, forces himself to sleep with girls, signs up for the army … and goes at any lengths to hide his trauma.

Jamie’s journey to transform himself into a hyper-masculine male is our inciting incident, propelling us towards an array of important characters who provide further crucial perspectives on how fragile masculinity and male violence affects them. When local barmaid, Ellie (24), begins to receive inappropriate texts from an anonymous admirer and fears she is being followed, her whole life becomes fixated on surviving her walks home. Jamie is helped by the musclebound mentor, Max (28), who takes him under his wing while Max is also coming to terms with an absent Father and having to provide for his Mother and sister. Jamie’s Dad harbours out of date norms of what a man should be and wishes his son would “act like a normal lad”. Sam is desperately trying to find out what happened to his best friend, confronting Jamie’s Dad’s out-of-date masculine stereotypes to get to the truth of what happened.

But how can you ever be a real man when you’ve been raped? Can Jamie ever be the man his Dad and society demands of him? When Jamie comes face to face with the man who raped him in a dramatic final twist, he learns the harsh truth of masculinity which could either send him over the edge, or set him free from his trauma.