I’ve found a couple of things on TV recently that I’ve enjoyed. I seem to be on a costume drama kick because I can’t seem to get into contemporary-set shows and movies, but put historical costumes on the characters and I’m interested.

First, there’s The Artful Dodger, which is a Hulu show, but it’s currently also available on Disney+. This is sort of a sequel to Oliver Twist, following the Artful Dodger (now going by his given name, Jack) years later. He got caught as a thief and was sentenced to be transported to Australia. On the voyage, he began helping the ship’s surgeon, got trained as a surgeon, and ended up joining the Royal Navy as a surgeon. Now he’s in his late 20s and has left the navy to be a surgeon at a hospital in Australia — and then Fagin shows up and tries to pull him back into a life of crime. It’s tempting because the surgeons aren’t on a salary. The patients pay them directly, and the higher-class surgeons get all the paying patients, leaving him with the charity cases, so he needs money, but he has to admit that he also kind of enjoys the thrill of a good scheme. And if he doesn’t get involved and help Fagin, there’s a good chance Fagin will screw it up and get him implicated anyway. Things get even more complicated when the governor’s daughter catches them in one of their schemes. She’ll stay silent if Jack will help her train to be a surgeon. She’s read all the books and keeps up on the latest medical journals, but has no practical experience. Between the two of them, with his practical experience and her book knowledge, they make the perfect surgeon — if only he can stay out of prison.

This is mostly a lighthearted caper show, though I sometimes find it hard to watch because it’s what I call Bad Decisions Theatre. Most of the trouble the characters get into is because they make really bad decisions, and I have to remind myself that the decisions make sense for the characters, even if they aren’t the choices I’d make. There’s still some, “Oh, no, don’t do that!” shouted at the screen. There’s a growing romance (that includes some bad decisions). They have a lot of fun with the Dickens source material, bringing in some characters from other books, and then their view of what Oliver Twist would turn out to be like as an adult is hilarious (and makes a lot of sense).

Jack/the Dodger is played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, perhaps best known as the little boy with a crush on his classmate in Love Actually, but also the oldest kid in the first Nanny McPhee movie, along with appearances on Doctor Who, A Game of Thrones, and a cameo in The Force Awakens (hitting a geek trifecta), plus he was the voice of Ferb on Phineas and Ferb (must have been an easy gig because the running joke was that Ferb spoke once per episode). Now he’s all grown up, but he still somehow looks exactly the same as he did as a kid while still looking mature. He doesn’t have a baby face. I think it was that he came across as an old soul as a kid, so his features just solidified instead of changing. It took a little time in this show to get used to the idea of him being an adult and doing adult things (which wasn’t helped by the fact that I watched the show in January and February after watching Love Actually on Christmas Eve).

Then there’s the new production of The Count of Monte Cristo. I believe it will start airing on PBS in the US on March 22, but the whole series is already streaming on Passport if you donate to your PBS station. I think I was in high school when I read the book (when I went through a Dumas phase that had nothing to do with any required reading in school), so the details are blurry enough that I don’t know how faithful this adaptation is, but it feels faithful, at least more so than a lot of movie adaptations tend to be. The story is about a young man who’s wrongfully imprisoned. While he spends 15 years locked away with no trial, a fellow prisoner educates him and clues him in about the location of a lost treasure. He manages to escape, then uses the treasure to set himself up in the new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo. When he learns about the three men who got him sent to prison to further their own positions, he sets out to get his revenge on them. What I’ve always loved about this story is that he doesn’t get revenge by doing anything to them. He merely reveals things they’ve done (sometimes getting justice for other people they’ve wronged) or sets up traps that they walk into because of their corruption (a good person wouldn’t be caught in these traps). It’s a great story if you find true justice satisfying, though the first episode when our hero is getting wrongfully imprisoned is tough to get through.

I thought this was an excellent adaptation and I watched the whole thing in a week because it was like a book I couldn’t put down. Sam Claflin plays “Monte Cristo,” and I was surprised to see that he’s become something of a rom-com leading man in recent years because I mostly remember him as the guy in the thankless roles in fantasy-type movies. He was the young missionary held captive by the pirates in the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and he was the duke’s son who’d been Snow White’s childhood friend in Snow White and the Huntsman. He was supposed to be the Mr. Wrong in the love triangle with the Huntsman, but I thought he was a far more interesting character. I think he does a good job here as a guy who had most human feeling burnt out of him and who’s fixating on the wrong thing for what will fix him. He’s simultaneously a good guy and a bit of a soulless monster, and the fact that he’s being a soulless monster is eating away at the good guy part of him.

If you have Passport, check it out now, and if you don’t, then check it out when it comes on TV. Passport is probably the most reasonable streaming service. It’s a $5/month (or $60/year) donation, and you get so many of the Masterpiece Theatre shows (present and past), plus all the Ken Burns documentaries, tons of Great Performances stuff, etc. There are the usual sponsor promos at the beginning of a show, like when you watch on PBS, but no ad breaks, and you can usually get all the pledge drive programming without the pledge breaks. They also usually drop whole seasons up front so you don’t have to wait for the next episode, and sometimes, like in this case, they drop them before they come on TV. Since I’m not a night owl but live in the Eastern time zone, I like it for time shifting. I may watch the episodes on the same day they air, but I watch them an hour or more earlier. (I’m not being sponsored here, I just genuinely think this is a good deal and a good cause.)