Brave the sea of period TV offerings and you’ll generally find that they fit into one of three categories: soapy, romantic “mom shows” like Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age; brutal, intense “dad shows” like Peaky Blinders and The Knick; and sexy, postmodern “youth shows” like The Great, Dickinson, and Bridgerton. The Aussie series The Artful Dodger conveniently combines all three modes into an enjoyable zippy package that just happens to feature two of the most iconic characters Charles Dickens ever created: charismatic pickpocket Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a.k.a. the Artful Dodger, and squirrelly crime lord Fagin (David Thewlis). Call it a something-for-everyone smorgasbord befitting an author who wrote for the masses.
The Artful Dodger (whose eight episodes all begin streaming on Hulu Nov. 29) announces its youth credentials straight away, with an opening montage set to Wolfmother’s “Joker and the Thief.” Fifteen years after the events of Oliver Twist, Brodie-Sangster’s now grown-up Dodger swaggers his way through a poker game, then makes a mad dash to the local hospital. Turns out he’s an up-and-coming surgeon… but only because this is an Australian colony in the 1850s, the operating room is a public gallery filled with a whooping and hollering crowd, and the patient is wide awake as the doctors prepare to saw his wounded leg off. Dodger makes a bet he can complete the entire operation in less than 29 seconds, and the episode’s energy doesn’t let up until that leg has audibly hit the ground.
In other words, you’ll know straight away if this bloody, bone-crunching miniseries is something you can stomach or not. Still, it’s worth noting that The Artful Dodger takes its cues more from something like Grey’s Anatomy than Game of Thrones. While each episode features at least one gory surgical set piece, the point here is less to luxuriate in historical bloodshed than to explore the evolution of modern surgery. As the show details, this is the era where things like anesthesia and germ theory were just being introduced to the medical field. And that gives The Artful Dodger’s brutality a sense of hope. The show is gritty, but not particularly grim.
