A Charles Dickens character grown up and hiding in plain sight drives this Australian-made period drama, following the boy once known as the Dodger into an adulthood he never quite escapes cleanly.
What is The Artful Dodger about?
Transplanted to 1850s Australia, the series picks up years after the events readers know from Oliver Twist and finds its central figure working by day as a respected surgeon while old instincts keep pulling him back toward the criminal underworld he supposedly left behind. That double life sits at the center of the show, with each episode pushing the tension between the man he has built himself into and the pickpocket he was raised to be. The colonial setting gives the material a different texture than a straight Dickens adaptation would, trading foggy London streets for a rougher, sun-bleached frontier where reputations can be remade but old habits are harder to shake. Supporting characters drawn from both his past and his present complicate the balancing act further as the season unfolds.
About the cast
Thomas Brodie-Sangster leads as the title character, with David Thewlis, Maia Mitchell, and Damon Herriman rounding out a cast built around the push and pull between the surgeon's world and the criminal one that keeps calling him back. The ensemble carries much of the show's tonal balancing act between period drama and darker crime material.
Context & significance
The Artful Dodger takes one of Dickens' most memorable supporting characters and imagines a life for him well beyond the pages of Oliver Twist, relocating the story to colonial Australia rather than staying in Victorian London. That shift lets the series lean into frontier medicine and penal-colony history alongside its crime plotting, giving the Dickens-inspired premise a setting rarely used for this kind of adaptation.
Watching The Artful Dodger on Ktime
The Artful Dodger is available on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles, ready to stream once you sign in with a free account. K-Time's Farsi-first interface and recommendations make it straightforward to pick up a period crime drama like this one in Persian from the very first episode.