Series Premiere:
The Artful Dodger
Cast & Crew
Matt Roush says...
Though set in the mid-19th century, the music and the raucous tone are all too contemporary in a hectic sequel of sorts to Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The rascally master pickpocket Artful Dodger (aka Jack Dawkins) has grown up (played by The Queen’s Gambit’s Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and somehow evolved through Navy experience into a skilled surgeon in training, living in the rowdy colony of Australia’s Port Victory amid other not-quite-reformed scamps. His road to respectability is complicated by the arrival of his former mentor, the unscrupulous Fagin (a hammy David Thewlis), but he may find the perfect ally in the progressive-minded Lady Belle (Good Trouble’s Maia Mitchell), daughter of the Governor and a would-be surgeon herself. It’s all a bunch of lively nonsense.