‘The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin’ Review: Noel Fielding in Thin but Enjoyably Silly Apple TV+ Comedy
The Brit funnyman stars as an 18th century highwayman who builds a reputation for panache while trying to escape the clutches of a corrupt thief-taker, played by Hugh Bonneville.
‘The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin’
Apple TV+Just to be clear, Apple TV+‘s The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin is not a spinoff of Max’s Our Flag Means Death. The two shows do not share the same creative team, nor the same characters. No one involved with either has ever suggested they might in any way be related.
Nevertheless, a viewer might be forgiven for presuming that they could be. Both are cheerfully anachronistic comedies about 18th century Englishmen fleeing conventional society to turn outlaw. Both heroes raise eyebrows in their new milieu for their naivete, their sartorial flair and their distaste for violence. Both nevertheless win the loyalty of a quirky crew who find they quite like this softer version of their bloodthirsty trade.
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The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin
But if Dick Turpin borrows much from Our Flag Means Death‘s vibe, it shares much less of its earnest substance. This one is silliness all the way down, and less gripping for it. Still, it’s got enough panache (to use Dick’s favorite word) to charm viewers for a little while — if not necessarily to keep them invested for the long haul.
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Creators Claire Downes, Ian Jarvis and Stuart Lane establish the goofball vibe early on, as Dick (Noel Fielding) holds up a carriage whose aristocratic occupants are so delighted to meet “the most famous and dashing highwayman of all time” that they eagerly hand over their property. This will turn out to be just a dream Dick’s having in jail, but his waking life looks hardly less fanciful.
In short order, we learn that while his father (a terrific Mark Heap) is a butcher, Dick is a vegan pacifist with no desire to learn the family trade. After the two argue about how Dick spends his time — for instance, constructing elaborate model villages out of vegetables rather than slicing and dicing meat — Dick packs up his favorite purple boots and his trusty sewing machine to strike out on his own. One unlikely string of misunderstandings and accidents later, he finds himself the unwitting leader of the Essex Gang.
Or so Dick claims to Eliza (Dolly Wells), a writer eager to turn his exploits into salacious true-crime pamphlets. Dick Turpin underlines its own artificiality in the premiere by framing Dick’s backstory as a yarn he’s spinning. A hardened criminal listening in scoffs that it sounds made up, only to change his tune when Eliza recaps the tale to make Dick sound less bumbling and more dashing. Dick himself smirks directly at the camera not once but twice, letting us know that he too is in on the joke.
What that joke is, however, isn’t entirely clear, given that Dick Turpin drops the myth-versus-reality conceit almost immediately. The next five chapters take Dick’s story at face value, with no more fourth-wall-breaking grins or revisionist pamphlet scripts.
There’s no risk of anyone taking the series as literal fact — I know nothing about the real Dick Turpin, but feel pretty confident that he never tugged on a pair of metallic blue leggings and silver lamé cowboy boots to pass himself off as a time traveler from 15 minutes into the future. Nevertheless, it seems a missed opportunity that Dick Turpin barely tries to grapple with the way legends can be constructed, manipulated and weaponized.
Then again, taking things seriously isn’t Dick Turpin‘s MO. If anything, its appeal lies in how utterly unserious it is about everything. The whole show has the mischievous but fundamentally wholesome air of a kid trying to make his friends laugh any way he can.
Magical artifacts resemble glowing plastic prisms or bedazzled oven mitts. A rival (Connor Swindells) announces himself via an elaborate musical number. The ruthless and corrupt thief-taker, Jonathan (Hugh Bonneville), spends one half-hour episode growling things like “I won’t rest until I’ve got Dick firmly in my grasp.”
Here and there the show might gesture toward the idea that Dick is upending his culture’s norms about gender, as when he offers to sew a man a dress or imagines a world where men and women get equal pay. But Dick Turpin is less interested in proffering subversive commentary than in giggling at the sight gag of Dick wandering around disguised as a nun bullfighter, complete with a catchphrase: “Olé, let’s pray.”
The fizziness becomes a liability, however, when it extends as well to the central characters. The impish Fielding is perfectly cast as the lovably oddball Dick. But neither his performance nor the writing seem certain whether Dick is a lucky fool or a secret genius, whether he’s actually as charming as he believes himself to be, whether he really wants to stand up for the little guy or simply enjoys saying he does.
His devoted sidekicks Moose and Duayne are even less dimensional, despite energetic performances by Marc Wooton and Duayne Boachie; of the gang, only grumpy Nell (Ellie White) is given a proper arc as she warms slowly but surely to Dick’s kinder ways. With characters this thin, Dick Turpin struggles to inject any stakes into their relationships. Certainly, there’s nothing here as heartfelt or surprising as the many queer romances that helped make Our Flag Means Death such a cult hit.
Dick Turpin might not, in the end, be equipped to convey any ideas or sentiments more profound than the epiphany the protagonist comes to late in the season: “Dick Turpin’s great, and I’m Dick Turpin!” It’s as airy as the breeze that ruffles its hero’s famously silken locks, and like any breeze its impact is minor and fleeting. But it’s fun while it lasts, and asks nothing more of us than to sit back and let the show do its thing. Just don’t expect to get much more in return.