Season 24 - Dandelion Dead (1994-1995)
Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong was a man convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife in 1921 and the attempted murder of his business rival, Oswald Martin, later the same year. He would probably have gotten away with the murder of his wife if not for his attack on his rival, whose father-in-law was the local chemist from whom Armstrong bought the poison used in both cases supposedly to deal with the dandelions in his yard. The practically nonexistent dandelions. The father-in-law put two and two together and the rest, as they say, is history. The case inspired both Dorothy L. Sayers and Frances Iles, AKA Anthony Berkeley Cox. But it was Michael Kitchen and his genius who brought this man so fully to life. First off, let it be known, I am a Michael Kitchen stan. I fell in love with his understated method of crime solving in Foyle's War and worked my way through his back catalog. If you haven't seen him as Branwell Brontë in The Brontes of Haworth I question your dedication to the actor, your love of British miniseries, and your interest in the Brontës themselves. Yes, the absolute fro of hair and mutton chops for days may at first distract you, but once you hear that voice, well, you are in for another classic Kitchen performance. And it's that ability to reel you in, to side with him that this drama uses so deviously. For the first quarter of this miniseries you identify so strongly with Kitchen as Armstrong that you can see why he'd kill his wife. She's portrayed as a demanding harridan. She's unmanageable and untenable and by being given just this glimpse into this couple's life we see that Armstrong really only had one way out. But that's the point, we are given just this slice of life. His views, his opinions, his struggles. Then, after she is dispatched, we see a different side of him. Maybe his wife wasn't how he portrayed her to us. Little hints of who he really is starts to seep in. The womanizing, the venereal diseases. All this comes as a shock and makes you think, how could I have gotten the wrong end of the stick so thoroughly. That is all down to the genius of Kitchen. Once we know the truth and he sets his eyes on Oswald Martin, brilliantly played by David Thewlis the series shifts once more into a dark comedy with Armstrong's ham-handed attempts to get ride of his rival. First he attempts to bump off Martin with poisoned chocolates. But not being able to witness the ingestion leads to a bit of a mix-up. Therefore the second attempt is done under his watchful eye at his home. In other words, his desire to destroy his rival makes him show his hand. This leads to much palaver. Did Armstrong just try to kill him? Wait, were those chocolates him? And then the father-in-law putting it all together. Brilliant. The timing leads to it being humorous without being overplayed. The trio arriving to report their findings to the police is comic gold but also, just three desperate people trying to save themselves. Needless to say, Armstrong doesn't get away with it. But, for a moment, Kitchen made you wish he did.
Of all the famous literary characters the world over I do not think any of them come close to Sherlock Holmes when it comes to adaptations. There are the canonically accurate adaptations but there are just as many parodies, pastiches, and perhapses. And one must 
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 
