‘The Decameron’ Review: They Take a Holiday. Death Doesn’t.

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‘The Decameron’ Review: They Take a Holiday. ****** Doesn’t.

TV audiences have an appetite for a good class-conscious satire of rich people on holiday in a fabulous location — say, a stunning Italian getaway — and the servants who attend them. The new

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series “The Decameron” draws on medieval literature to offer a raucous twist on this premise, heightened with the looming threat of bubonic plague.

“The White Lotus,” meet the ****** ******.

In the 14th-century work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a precursor to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” 10 young people flee to a rural estate from ********-ridden Florence, entertaining one another by telling stories both dramatic and raunchy. The 10 tales per ********, as told over 10 days, makes for a cycle of 100 stories, proving that even before streaming media, creators know how to stretch out material to series length.

The eight-episode

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series, arriving Thursday, is a loose adaptation — very loose, like a caftan. It borrows Boccaccio’s character names and setting, with some nods to the source stories. But the creator, Kathleen Jordan (of the gone-too-soon “Teenage Bounty Hunters”), reimagines it as a rollicking social comedy of striving and survival.

Jordan introduces four sets of characters, offered respite at a villa in, as the invitation puts it, “the beautiful, not-infected countryside.”

We meet Pampinea (Zosia Mamet), a noblewoman anxious about being unmarried as “a shriveled-up, 28-year-old maid,” and her perhaps-too-devoted ********, Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson); Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a sickly and pompous young noble attended by his quackish physician, Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel); the devout and secretly ****** Neifile (Lou Gala) and her social-climbing husband, Panfilo (Karan Gill); and Licisca (Tanya Reynolds), the eccentric and put-upon handmaiden to the imperious Filomena (Jessica Plummer).

The holiday offers a chance at life, solace and social advancement — especially for Pampinea, who has managed a sight-unseen engagement to the villa’s absent lord. But despite the estate’s gorgeous furnishings and manicured maze gardens, there are deceptions and dangers.

Outside its gates, the countryside is rife with brigands and desperate refugees of “the pestilence,” convinced that they are living in the End Times. Within, the staff, headed by the cagey Sirisco (Tony Hale, playing to anxious type) and the steady Stratilia (Leila Farzad), are under tremendous strain, barely maintaining the facade of a pleasurable household.

The company soon realize that they are in a gilded life raft on a sea of anarchy and ********. (Tindaro estimates that they can hold out for five years. “With limited cannibalism, six.”) The guests of the villa divide into factions, cutting across class lines, vying for control of the property. The carefree getaway becomes an apocalyptic medieval soap-com: “Succession” crossed with “The Walking *****” and rendered as a tapestry.

Jordan plays “The Decameron” for mordant laughs. Its vision of the plague-ridden streets of Florence is more

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than Albrecht Dürer. The tone is cheeky; the soundtrack flips between Vivaldi and New Order.

On one level, “The Decameron” resembles a more acerbic version of twisted-history comedies like “Dickinson” and “My Lady Jane.” It has a joyfully rude, farcical energy. And the plot of swapped identities, secrets, ****** couplings and romantic scheming in an idyllic setting suggest a modern take on a Shakespeare comedy.

As with a modern production of Shakespeare, it takes strong performers to make their characters feel of their time but not self-consciously antiquated, and “The Decameron” has chosen well. Reynolds, in particular, is spellbinding as a wily, almost feral ******** who embraces a sudden change in her circumstances. McMeekin arrests attention whenever he blusters into a scene, and Mamet seems to be having the time of her life.

If its story is a little shaggy, “The Decameron” makes for a soapily slapstick summer diversion. But Jordan also manages to weave in moments of deeper emotion and an understanding, however comic, of the mind-set of characters who believe that **** has abandoned the world. “Maybe we didn’t build enough cathedrals,” Panfilo says. “Or maybe we built too many. He works in mysterious ways, right?”

Are we far enough from our own pandemic that audiences can laugh at medieval Europe’s? Maybe that catharsis is part of the appeal. “The Decameron” is under no illusions about the terrors of ****** or the frailties and vanities of humanity, but it counterweights that with spirited comedy. As a 14th-century physician might say, its humors are well in balance.

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