The Artful Dodger

Blood, Dirt, and Second Chances

I’ve always been a little amused by how we now treat Dickens like a brittle relic, forgetting that his stuff was basically the Victorian equivalent of a scandalous weekend serial—full of melodrama, cheap thrills, and relentless momentum. *The Artful Dodger* leans into that energy. Created by David Maher, David Taylor, and James McNamara, this Australian show doesn’t just borrow from *Oliver Twist*; it yanks the lovable street rat out of London, ages him up, and plunks him down into the sweatbox of 1850s Port Victory. Jack Dawkins isn’t lifting pocket watches anymore—he’s amputating legs as a surgeon with a sterling reputation. The premise sounds flashy, maybe even gimmicky, but it lands because the series sees that both trades demand the same nimble hands and compromised ethics.



The noise hits you first. This isn’t the silent, composed period drama where actors lean against velvet drapes. It’s loud, in-your-face, tactile. The camera rarely drifts; it breathes with Jack’s own jittery pulse. Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays him on pure nervous energy. Sure, we’ve seen Brodie-Sangster as the solemn kid in *The Maze Runner* or the reserved genius in *The Queen’s Gambit*, but now his boyishness becomes a weapon. He looks like a child in an oversized doctor’s coat, so when his face tightens, when trauma wracks him, it hits with real violence. When Fagin (David Thewlis, gloriously grimy) shows up in Australia, you can see Jack physically collapse. The confident surgeon folds in on himself; the hungry street kid who once begged for validation resurfaces instantly.



Thewlis feels born to play this worn-out predator. He’s not a cartoonish villain but a parasite who clings to survival by milking everyone else’s weakness. Their relationship steadies the show’s whiplash mix of medical melodrama and heist punk, especially now that season two is out. The stakes climb to nearly exhausting heights—hangman’s noose, Luke Bracey’s Inspector Boxer, new threats lurking everywhere. I’m not convinced the show needed to push pacing even harder—sometimes the relentless mix of modern pop songs and rapid edits feels like it’s trying too hard to sell the adrenaline. But then it hits the operating room, slows down, and the tone snaps into place.



The surgeries themselves feel less like medical work and more like gladiatorial spectacles—accurate to the era. In one early chunk, Jack is forced to amputate while spectators bet and cheer. The tension isn’t simply whether the patient lives; it’s about the show. He uses his pickpocket finesse to clamp arteries and slash through flesh in a blur of motion. The scene is loud, wet, and viscerally uncomfortable. Hugo Rifkind of The Times nailed it: the show “will leave you feeling pretty damn glad that they eventually invented anaesthetic.” Amid the blood and rusty instruments stands Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), the governor’s daughter determined to be a surgeon. Their potential romance could have drifted into cliché, but Mitchell gives Belle a fierce intellect that slices through Jack’s bravado. Watch how she observes him—without sighing or swooning, but with sharp-eyed, strategic hunger. She wants those hands to help her survive, not simply to fall in love.

Whether that kind of chaotic mash-up is your thing depends on how much historical license you can tolerate. *The Artful Dodger* isn’t trying to be tidy. It’s scrappy, loud, and wildly entertaining—a hustle about people trying to escape their pasts only to discover that the gutter tricks they learned are what keep them breathing in polite company. It might be messy, but it feels incredibly alive.