It feels like it’s been a minute since we got a really weird attempt to mash-up classic literature with the conventions of modern TV; once upon a time, pilot season would regularly fill up with shows about Nancy Drew as a tough-as-nails adult detective, or that pitched show we still think about sometimes where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn lived in modern times and ran a law firm together. Recently, that well seems to have dried up, though—but not entirely, as Hulu released the first teaser for The Artful Dodger this week, the TV show that dares to ask whether Charles Dickens’ famous pickpocket might not have gone on to be a doctor in Australia, for some reason.
Sporting one of the very worst taglines we’ve ever seen for a television show—“The Dodger is in,” which is nothing—the series stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster as an adult version of Oliver Twist’s old pal, who must balance his past (and, occasionally, present) love of theft with his more respectable life as a doctor. David Thewlis co-stars as Dodger’s old pal Fagin, who apparently intrudes into his new life as a reminder that you can never truly escape your past, especially if your past is recounted in one of the most popular novels of all time, a hit musical, and a movie in which you were played by Billy Joel as a dog.
In addition to Brodie-Sangster and Thewlis, the series also stars Maia Mitchell as a young woman who apparently knows Dodger’s secret and like to swirl chemicals around in beakers. The tone of the whole thing actually feels pretty fun: Some heists, some class consciousness, a bit of light 19th century medical horror; we’ll know more when the series debuts on Hulu on November 29.