The Artful Dodger
Here's the thing. I am the target audience for The Artful Dodger. Period piece set in Australia which continues the chronicles of Charles Dickens with beloved named stars and I only heard about it by accident. This is a crime against humanity. And by humanity, I mean it's a crime against me in particular. Thankfully things worked out. This past holiday season I rewatched David Thewlis in the magnificent 2015 adaptation of An Inspector Calls. Which got me to thinking, what else has David Thewlis been up to lately? And I saw he was playing Fagin in a show called The Artful Dodger with Thomas Brodie-Sangster and oddly Tim Minchin, who is the composer and lyricist for the Broadway musical Matilda, which made me cry for hours and hours. Damn you Minchin! I instantly went, I must watch this show immediately. Which lead me to learning that my PS3 no longer supports Hulu and therefore I'd have to find a time to watch it when I wasn't on the treadmill. At about the time I finally started watching it was when Disney+ and Hulu merged and out of nowhere everyone was talking about this show. A show which had premiered almost half a year earlier. I mean it's not like the weird Suits success years after it ended, but The Artful Dodger took awhile to find it's audience. People were binging it as fast as they could. Twitter, and yes, I will always call it that, was twittering about how this show deserved a larger audience and several seasons. That The Artful Dodger isn't just a show to binge and forget, it was a show to binge and to never recover from. While I agree that more seasons would fill me with glee, I don't think I'm as fanatical was the other viewers. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a wonderful concept and a fresh twist on the Charles Dickens classic, Oliver Twist, with Dodger finding a new life as a surgeon in Australia and running into Fagin who has been transported there and is up to his old tricks, as well as some wonderful jokes at the expense of Oliver being thrown in. But despite the stellar casting this felt like a kind of in between show. It was in between being a kind of cheap Jack of All Trades esque show and a typical Dickens adaptation. Mostly likely this had to do with budget. And don't get me wrong, I'm not disparaging shows like Jack of All Trades, which I adore. It's just that you can see that the money wasn't there and it makes me sad, almost as sad as those weird cages all the women were wearing under their dresses. Do they REALLY have to swing that much!?! But again, budget. I would far rather a show look cheap and be well acted than the reverse. It's why I love British miniseries from the seventies. Because in the end, this isn't about the money, all though within the story, it is about the money, it's about the characters and their relationships and how I got so invested that everything else fell away. Now I'm not saying that slapping on a banging Murray Gold score like Gentleman Jack, a show with the same type of pacing, wouldn't bring this show to a whole new madcap level. I'm just saying it can do without. But with it would be amazing.
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