Long before the days of horror movies and doomscrolling, audiences partial to gnarly spectacle found their entertainment elsewhere – including live surgeries and good old-fashioned public hangings. Both are recurring events in The Artful Dodger, Disney+’s darkly comedic eight-part series set in Australia circa the 1850s. The plot zigzags around the exploits of the titular Dickensian character – real name Jack Dawkins – who appeared in Oliver Twist as the leader of a gang of pipsqueak riff-raff. Now he lives on in his own semi-ridiculous narrative, which imagines he scooted off to Australia and became a surgeon, all the while continuing his thoroughly dodgy ways.
Being a surgeon and a pickpocket, you see, both require quick fingers, in case you were wondering how these fields overlap on the Venn diagram of medical procedures and criminal shenanigans. If Dawkins as a character in literature is frozen in time, for ever young in Dickens’s story, so, it seems, is the actor who now plays him: Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who is 33 but looks like he plays hopscotch at lunchtime. Brodie-Sangster brings an appealing pluck and derring do, convincingly playing a slick operator who’s a dab hand but can’t be trusted – not even when it comes to the immutable laws of ageing.
During early sequences, Dawkins bursts into the operating room and receives a hero’s welcome from a whooping crowd. He knows how to hold their attention, proclaiming “we have a fine one for you today, gents!” in relation to his victi – er, patient, who fell down a mine shaft and shattered his leg, which Dodger announces he will amputate in less than 43 seconds (beating his colleague’s record). The subsequent flurry to get this done reflects the tempo of the production and the attitude of director Jeffrey Walker: keep it fast, keep the action bubbling, and don’t give audiences time to ponder how silly it is.
This high energy mischievousness is well sustained across the four episodes available for review, coming from several places simultaneously: the editing, which bounces around like a pinball; the cast, who deliver their lines almost breathlessly; and the plotting, which begins in media res, Dawkins facing off against Tim Minchin’s villainous cheat Darius Cracksworth at the card table. Our anti-hero loses badly and must cough up serious coinage – or lose an arm. This MacGuffin coincides with the arrival of a specter from his past, Norbert Fagin, a splotchy-skinned scoundrel played with delicious weaselness by David Thewlis, who pulls the Dodger back into a life of crime and delivers fun lines such as: “I’ve heard some guff in my time but that really puts the pickle in the biscuit jar.”
Dawkins agrees to do one final job, which of course means many jobs, of escalating intensity. On the surgical side of things, he’s blackmailed by the governor’s quick-witted daughter, Lady Belle Fox (an entertainingly sassy Maia Mitchell), into allowing her to become the first female surgeon, giving the show a feminist tang. Fox and Fagin are the agents of change, exploiting the Dodger and spearheading the core plotlines – involving surgery and criminality – that are wrapped together like a double helix.
Created by David Maher, David Taylor and James McNamara, The Artful Dodger joins a run of recent television shows set during the 19th-century Australian gold rushes. They include the neo-western mystery drama New Gold Mountain and, more similar tonally, the rowdy comedy series Gold Diggers, following two indecorous sisters looking for cashed-up suitors.
The Artful Dodger is easily the most fun, and, unlike Gold Diggers, doesn’t run out of puff, fully committing to a twisty storyline told with panache. Even when the plotting is a little familiar, the packaging feels fresh: it’s the show’s wild energy that keeps it zipping along. The cast and crew read from the same sped-up song sheet, tongue firmly in cheek, resulting in a sweet spot that is playful, whimsical and self-conscious, but never smugly so.
The Artful Dodger is on Disney+ in Australia and on Hulu in US from 29 November, with a UK date to follow.
