When modern-day TV writers take characters from classic literature and transport them to a new story, they definitely take a lot of risks. Do they try to give people who know the original work some Easter eggs or do they make a completely new story? The creators of a new Hulu series that transports two of Charles Dickens’ most famous characters forward 15 years, pretty much did the latter.
Opening Shot: A faint thumping is heard, then behind a closed door we see a group of men banging their feet in the gallery of a surgical theater. In the meantime, there’s a poker game going on.
The Gist: During that poker game, Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) goes all in, and puts in an IOU. He has a great hand, but his opponent finds a card up his sleeve and cheats his way to a win. Now Jack owes a local thug the princely sum of £26, which he doesn’t have. He dashes out of the room, and goes straight to that surgical theater.
Yes, Jack is a surgeon, and he bets his fellow surgeon, Dr. Rainsford Sneed (Nicholas Burton) that he can amputate the patient’s leg in record time. He does indeed cut off the smashed leg in record time, but the screaming men in the crowd don’t throw enough money in his hat to nearly cover his debt.
Meanwhile, Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell) is writing in a journal, dated October, 1855, about a patient she’s studied. She studies medical science, and is keen on a study that’s being done with using ether as anesthesia. Belle and her younger sister Fanny (Lucy-Rose Leonard) are the daughters of the territory’s governor, Edmund Fox (Damien Garvey); a suitor named Cuthbert Smales (Tom Budge) has come from London to court her, but Belle isn’t interested, much to Fanny’s chagrin, since she can’t get married until Belle does.
Jack thinks he’s run away from his debt, but the thug he owes money to catches up with him, and threatens to cut off one of his hands if he doesn’t come up with the money.
While checking in prisoners and assigning them to work details, a familiar face arrives: Fagin (David Thewlis), who taught Jack the art of pickpocketing when he was a boy back in London. Both men thought the other was dead; even alive, Fagin might as well be dead to Jack, given that his mentor and father figure left him rotting in a London prison. But Jack reluctantly takes him in, making Fagin his inmate servant.
Once Fagin gets wind that Jack owes money, he figures the easiest way to get it is to go back to their old stealing ways. Jack thinks those days are over, since he’s now a respected surgeon and a former Royal Navy officer, but he also wants to keep both of his hands.
Jack and Belle cross paths when her carriage accidentally hits a boy, and Jack is summoned to take care of the emergency. The boy has a compound leg fracture, and normally Jack would amputate. But Belle wants him to use ether to anesthetize the boy and save the leg. She takes him to the governor’s mansion, while her father is holding a gathering of the territory’s high rollers. Fagin sees this as a perfect opportunity to help his “son” pay back his debt, and Belle sees an opportunity of her own.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Artful Dodger was created by James McNamara, David Maher and David Taylor as a sequel to Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. There is a 2007 Oliver Twist series based on the original novel, so let’s link those two shows, shall we? (There’s also a 1968 movie Oliver!, but that one’s a musical.)
Our Take: It’s risky to take two classic characters in literature like the Artful Dodger and Fagin and put them in a new story almost 200 years after their debut. But the creators of the series The Artful Dodger manages to pull it off by taking the characters and transporting them to a new setting as well as making sure that their meeting here is the first time they’ve seen each other in the intervening time. By doing that, they make Jack and Fagin into new characters with a history instead of the continuation of beloved characters from literature.
They’re not being precious with the characters or the story, infusing it with a modern soundtrack, keeping the dialogue relatively straightforward and making sure the characters have a sense of humor. It also helps that they have given Jack a worthy foil in Belle. In fact, if you want to say that the story in The Artful Dodger is an attempt to graft Dickens with Bridgerton, you wouldn’t be far off.
The first episode sets up some interesting situations for the first season, with Jack trying to balance being a respectable member of the community with a returned desire to be the thief he was when he was a kid in London. Belle is trying to become a surgeon in a world where women are married off to boring fops like Smales instead of pursuing careers in medicine. Fagin wants to repair his relationship with Jack. There is also the matter Captain Gaines (Damon Herriman), the territory’s police chief who hangs people for relatively minor offenses, all in the effort to rid the region of who he deems are bad elements.
We hope to see all of these scenarios come together as the season goes along. Given the chemistry we already see between the members of the cast, especially between Brodie-Sangster and Mitchell, it seems that the entertaining irreverence we saw during the first episode will continue.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Belle gives Jack an ultimatum after she finds a necklace Fagin stole in Jack’s pocket: She can rat him out, and Gaines will end up hanging him, or make her a surgeon. “I’m thinking,” he says somewhat seriously.
Sleeper Star: David Thewlis is a lot of fun as Fagin, who seems to have some pangs of regret about how he left things with Jack… but not really.
Most Pilot-y Line: A woman calls in Jack, complaining of “thigh pain.” she takes his hand, puts it on her thigh, and demonstrates how the pain is moving up, not coincidentally towards her “loins region.” Really subtle, isn’t it?
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Artful Dodger doesn’t try to replicate the vibe of Oliver Twist. It has its own vibe, one that moves quickly, is often funny, and is mostly entertaining to watch.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.