Netflix’s ‘The Decameron’ Is a Shrewdly Funny Retelling of Bocaccio’s Epic: TV Review

variety.com:

Alison Herman TV Critic Before there were single-location concept shows or Zoom table reads, there was the original pandemic-adjacent entertainment: Bocaccio’s “The Decameron,” the 14th-century anthology framed around a group of Italian nobles sheltering from the Black Plague in the Tuscan countryside.

A millennium-old book of short stories may be a deep cut even for our reboot-crazed culture, but there’s a certain logic to bringing “The Decameron” back in the aftermath of another society-spanning disease. “The Decameron,” the eight-episode limited series created by Kathleen Jordan (“Teenage Bounty Hunters”) for Netflix, was — by its own press materials’ admission — “very loosely inspired” by “The Decameron” as published in the 1300s.

Gone is the storytelling structure, with each guest spinning tales to pass the time, á la “The Canterbury Tales” or “One Thousand and One Nights.” Jordan’s version focuses entirely on the Florentine aristocrats and long-suffering servants cooped up in a villa, each with their own ulterior motives.

In that sense, it recalls “The White Lotus,” the current high water mark for confinement-inspired art (COVID edition). While “The Decameron” may not reach the heights of Mike White’s contingency plan turned HBO crown jewel, the series is a tartly funny showcase for a uniformly excellent ensemble. (Executive producer Jenji Kohan, of “Orange Is the New Black,” knows a thing or two about sprawling casts funneled into a single location.) As the days tick by and desperation mounts, the forced politeness of strangers forced to share space and potentially toxic air gives way to mounting chaos.