Here’s how to get a television programme and/or film made nowadays: Take an iconic character from an existing piece of intellectual property (that’s what studio executives call art), make them cooler, sexier and vaguely anachronistic, and put them in a new context – an origin story, a school. See, for examples, Emma Stone as Cruella, Timothée Chalamet as Wonka and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Adams. It’s a winning formula, so I’ve started today’s column with a few pitches along similar lines that TV executives are now free to purchase from me for $$$.
Muttley, Attorney at Law
Aviator Richard Dastardly’s hirsute, chuckling and asthmatic pal heads to the big city to get a job as an aviation lawyer. But he has a problem. What if people discover he’s a literal dog and thus is licensed neither to practise law nor to fly a plane? “Ruh-roh!” to quote his housemate Scooby-Doo (Claire Danes). Anyway, this is probably coming soon to Apple TV+, starring Jacob Elordi as Muttley, with Jon Hamm in jodhpurs and goggles as Dastardly.
Smurfs Up
Happy Smurf packs up his bong and his smurf board, leaves the oppressive rule of cult leader Papa Smurf and goes to Los Angeles to hang out with a variety of quirky oddballs and to heal. In California he learns to stop feeling blue, the true meaning of friendship and how to decipher the lyrics of The Beatles’ Helter Skelter. Debuting this week on Prime Video, no doubt, starring Timothée Chalamet as Happy Smurf and Jon Hamm in a wig as his lovable hippy neighbour Charles Manson.
Just Lisa
Lisa, aka the Mona Lisa, goes to a small boutique town in Alaska to run a B&B, in the process learning to stop following people with her eyes, because it’s creepy. Instead, she learns about the power of community. Maya Hawke, wearing googly eyeglasses, stars as “Lisa”. Jon Hamm in the nip is her ex, Michelangelo’s David. It’s on Paramount+, probably.
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Wherefore Art2-D2?
Lovelorn robotic hipster R2-D2, fresh from a break-up with someone just referred to as “Goldy”, is sent to a small picturesque New England town to direct a community-theatre production of Romeo and Juliet. How ironic yet eccentric and adorable! There’s a running joke about R2D2’s city-slicker upspeak and vocal fry, which nobody in the town can understand. Sydney Sweeney wearing a sort of large bucket stars as R2D2. Jon Hamm is the crotchety town mayor, Chewbacca, in the nip but wearing an ammunition belt. This one’s on Netflix, obviously.
The Artful Dodger
The Artful Dodger, Fagin’s sidekick in Oliver Twist, flees his criminal past and goes to Australia, where he works as a doctor. But oh no! His old accomplice Fagin has shown up in a prison barge and wants to drag him back into a life of crime. Okay, this one’s actually real, and it has been on Disney+ since last week. And even though Jon Hamm isn’t in it, I am, clearly, going to review it.
Charismatic perpetual child star Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays the eponymous Dodger. (They have a different actor playing the child Dodger in flashbacks, but I think Brodie-Sangster would have been able to get away with it.) He is now a surgeon. This outlandish scenario actually works. The Dodger has nimble fingers, we are told, useful for picking a pocket or two but also for fiddling around with people’s guts. I’ve just read a big, engaging history of surgery (Every Branch of the Healing Art, by Ronan Kelly, FYI), and surgeons were glorified butchers at this point in history, although because TV executives can’t conceive of failure the Artful Dodger is pretty successful at keeping his patients alive.
Fagin is played by the excellent David Thewlis, who apparently has not yet seen scenery he doesn’t want to chomp upon hungrily, and Dodger’s romantic foil is Belle (Maia Mitchell), an amateur experimental surgeon, ahistorical feminist and aristocrat (all the things you look for on Tinder). There are also a motley crew of quite Dickensian rogues, drunks, ogres, fops and idiots, of the sort you surely see around you in the office. There is also, as is obligatory in this day and age, a soundtrack of contemporary popular music, and so it is that we get the Artful Dodger being chased through the streets of Port Victory to the sound of Wolfmother caterwauling Joker and the Thief and not Henry Champion singing I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am. That’s a deep cut for lovers of Victorian music hall (the typical Irish Times reader, according to our research).
Given the likable cast, iconic characters, textured world-building and deft, funny and generally light-hearted script, this could have been an adventure romp suitable for all the family. But it still needs a little something to drive it home, doesn’t it? Something a bit extra. What could it be? What do children like? What do parents want their children to see? What do psychotherapists agree children should see more of?
Yes, that’s right: operations. Why don’t we take this beloved pickpocket of film and literature and have him perform grisly operations every 10 minutes? Yeah, real gruesome stuff. Not keyhole – that’s for nerds. I’m talking about hernias being goopily perforated by knives, protruding shards of bone being drilled with hand drills and then reset into gaping leg wounds, and close-ups of legs and arms being noisily and shriekingly sawn off. (In those days amputation seems to have been the answer to everything, kind of like Solpadeine today.) Anyway, kids love that stuff. Put graphic operations into Peppa Pig, you cowards!
The person who suggested this twist in the otherwise family-friendly Artful Dodger story was clearly trying to get fired. They didn’t count on the Disney corporation, which is like a stone-cold psychopath, calling its bluff. It kind of turns The Artful Dodger into Deadwood for kids, or possibly The Supervet (cute animals plus operations).
All in all, having a beloved character perform surgery is, in my view, a wonderfully deranged choice and is also, actually, pretty Dickensian (if not typically Disneysian). So I really like The Artful Dodger, gore and all. James McNamara, one of its three creators, is an academic who has a special interest in literary adaptations, so I’m guessing that’s why this deceptively slight spin-off actually feels weirdly authentic and lived in. It’s fun. Come for Brodie-Sangster and Thewlis’s bantering high jinks, but stay for the severed limbs and close-ups of gaping wounds.
True Detective: Night Country (Sky Atlantic and Now), the fourth season in the True Detective franchise, in contrast, is a grisly show that’s relatively low on chortles. An excellent female-led cast, including Jodie Foster, Kali Reis and Ireland’s own Fiona Shaw, are confronted by a research station empty of scientists, all of whom they eventually find naked, frozen and dead in a mound in the Alaskan ice. Foster’s character, a flinty local sherriff, refers to this unsettling sight as a corpsicle, which is pretty funny. I suspect, given the same material, the creators of The Artful Dodger would have just called the show Corpiscle! They would have definitely included more quips and shenanigans. For the most part Night Country’s showrunner, Issa López, endeavours to keep things promisingly mysterious and haunted. Look, we’re complex people. We can like both shows.
