Streaming in September: guilt-free true crime, Italian short stories onscreen, more 

NETFLIX: The Decameron

I’ve lived for half a year, all told, in Florence and Fiesole, the setting of The Decameron on Netflix, a series based on the collection of short stories from 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio. So I considered pretending that eating a lot of great meals and learning just enough Italian not to get lost gave me insight into Boccaccio’s book. Honestly, I never managed to read the damn thing, and I feel that the Netflix show is a mess. But it’s also terrifically watchable. 

Creator Kathleen Jordan’s previous, shot-in-Atlanta series, Teenage Bounty Hunters, was a snarky, homespun pleasure that Netflix stupidly canceled before it had time to grow into itself. Moving her focus from modern-day Georgia to pre-Renaissance Italy represents a big swing. The effort shows in episodes that vary scene-to-scene between clumsy slapstick and sudden heartbreak.

It’s 1348, and four sets of Florentine swells travel the short distance up the mountain to Fiesole to avoid the plague and be guests at the villa of fellow nobleman Leonardo. Nearing old maidenhood at age 28, the spoiled, shrieking Pampinea (Zosia Mamet, playing what amounts to the show’s Big Bad) is betrothed to Leonardo, though the two have never met. She’s accompanied by servant Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), silently grieving the death of her girlfriend. 

Then there’s Panfilo (Karan Gill), secretly gay but married to religious fanatic Neifile (Lou Gala). Pompous, book-smart hypochondriac Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) arrives with his personal doctor, Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel), whose frequent shirtlessness causes hormonal stirrings in guests of both genders. Finally, another pampered noblewoman, Filomena (Jessica Plummer), sets off for the villa with long-suffering servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). But a mishap en route causes the women to trade places, and the two briefly perform reversed roles as mistress and maid. 

When everyone arrives at the villa, they find Leonardo MIA, and his estate being run by two servants: Sirisco (Tony Hale) above stairs and Stratilia (Laila Farzad) in the kitchen. In Boccaccio’s original, the visitors spend their time entertaining each other with the 100 stories that give The Decameron its title. In the Netflix version, that doesn’t really happen. Instead, the show is an anything-goes black comedy about class warfare, romantic shenanigans and battle against occasional gangs of mercenaries and clergymen that besiege the villa’s walls. 

The storytelling’s shagginess yields some detours that pay off nicely. After belatedly confessing what makes theirs an impossible union (his love for men, hers for Jesus), Panfilo and Neifile enjoy an unexpected period of bliss. Likewise, other characters bond in surprising ways or die when you least expect it — or grow depths unsuspected beneath their shallow surfaces. 

However, the show’s tonal vacillations carry over to the performances. A couple of normally reliable comic actors flounder. The great Hale (Arrested Development and Veep) never quite hits as the villa’s majordomo. And Mamet can’t do much with the shrill, unredeemed Pampinea, descendant of her spoiled-brat breakthrough role in Girls. 

Other actors emerge unscathed or with enhanced skill sets. Memorable as a sci-fi loving goofball in Sex Education, Reynolds brings both hard-edged survival smarts and vulnerability to Licisca. Better known for her adorable freakouts in Derry Girls, Jackson gives Decameron its real heart as she struggles to wean herself from Pampinea’s grip. And as the blustering Tindaro, McMeekin comes seemingly out of nowhere to turn an obnoxious character endearing. 

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NETFLIX: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

Also on Netflix, the six-episode A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder at first looks like a project assembled by a committee jamming together some familiar IPs: cozy British village setting, attractive high school characters and a teen girl Nancy Drew-ing herself into a murder mystery that has echoes of the seminal American podcast Serial. It shouldn’t work, and sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s a pleasant comfort watch. 

Emma Myers plays Pip, the good girl of the title who lives in an idyllic small town with occasional hints of unrest. For instance, someone scrawls SCUM FAMILY on a wall near her house because Pip’s mother (Anna Maxwell Martin) is white and her stepdad (Gary Beadle) Black. There’s more darkness lurking, tied to the disappearance five years ago of older student Andie and the subsequent confession of murder by her boyfriend Sal. Sal took his own life, and Andie’s body never turned up. Local wounds remain fresh. So no wonder classmates, teachers and her parents alike frown at Pip’s decision to investigate, solve and write a term paper about a case everyone else considers closed. 

Guide is a pleasant mix of old hat and new details. It’s nice how Pip’s best pal Cara’s (Asha Banks) attraction to girls is treated as a nonevent and the way her parents are depicted with warmth and depth, though not idealized. 

Unfortunately, in its final twists and reveals, Guide borders on the overplotting of Harlan Coben, who has built a cottage industry with Netflix adaptations of his airplane thrillers: Safe, Stay Close, The Stranger and Hold Tight.

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APPLE TV+: Bad Monkey 

Though Carl Hiassen’s Florida-set crime larks haven’t had the same success moving from book to screen as Elmore Leonard’s — the king of American thrillers whose tales were natural film fodder — Hiassen’s work has some of that lively Leonard tang. Don’t bother with Demi Moore’s Striptease, which boiled the fun out of the source novel; the new, 10-episode Bad Monkey, continuing weekly through October 9, is worth a look.

Vince Vaughn stars as Yancey, a Key West cop demoted to inspecting restaurant kitchens after his public assault of his married girlfriend Bonnie’s (Michelle Monaghan) husband. Though he’s warned away by his former detective partner Ro (John Ortiz), Yancey can’t help sticking his nose in the case of a severed arm fished out of the ocean, determined to have belonged to the owner of a shady medical supply business in Miami. 

The man’s young wife, Eve (Meredith Hagner, charmingly duplicitous) seems all too eager to declare her husband dead and move on. Meanwhile, this mystery is somehow connected to a Bahamian man named Neville (Ronald Peet), who’s fighting an opportunistic developer named Christopher (Catastrophe’s Rob Delaney) by hiring a voodoo priestess known as the Dragon Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) to curse the guy. 

As shaggy narratives go, Monkey makes Decameron look sleek as a greyhound. But that’s the fun of the show. A downside is that while Vaughn is always an engagingly sardonic presence, at 54, he feels too old for the role. In scenes with Yancey’s reluctant partner in solving the mystery — gorgeous Miami coroner Rosa (Natalie Martinez) — his vibe comes off less sunbaked insouciance, more sunset seediness. Still, the show is worth sticking with if only for nostalgia. Though the book came out in 2013, it has a definite ’90s vibe, as if the global troubles, internet sniping and political chaos of the 21^st century have never troubled Hiassen’s South Florida setting. 

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APPLE TV+: Lady in the Lake

If Bad Monkey parties hard at being breezy, Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake works up a sweat trying to create the opposite effect. It’s a self-serious slog. As a 1966 Jewish woman in Baltimore named Maddie who leaves her loveless marriage and struggles against sexism, racism and any other isms she can find, Natalie Portman delivers the sort of technically precise but joyless performance that’s become her fallback since winning the Oscar with Black Swan. She’s playing a construct, not a person. 

After ditching her husband and whiny teen son, Maddie takes a shabby apartment in the Black neighborhood and starts digging around in the murder of Cleo (Moses Ingram), a woman who worked in a nightclub, tried to raise her sons right but was discovered dead in a local lake. 

We see Cleo’s life in flashback, and the struggles both she and Maddie face are meant to echo each other. In an arty decision that doesn’t quite work, Cleo delivers voiceover soliloquies throughout the show, chiding Maddie for exploiting the Black woman’s death for her own career. That’s a valid observation. Yet the show itself, based on a novel by Laura Lippman, is guilty of objectifying Cleo and her life. There’s a bigger problem, though — Lady in the Lake is literally too dark, complicated and grim to be much fun for anybody. Even the actors look unhappy. 

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HULU: Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer

If you’re in the mood for true rather than fictional crime, consider Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer. Fans of Netflix’s two-season, sadly canceled Mindhunter should definitely seek it out. In that fictionalized version about the creation of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit — the branch where the now familiar notion of criminal profiling was first developed in the 1970s — the psychiatrist played by Anna Torv is basically a version of this three-part documentary subject. 

She’s Dr. Ann Burgess, a psychiatric nurse whose methodological study of rape victims and their trauma led to her recruitment by the FBI, though the bureau never gave her the official recognition and publicity it showered on the BSU’s male members. Directed by Abigail Fuller, Mastermind gives us a real-life mix of gender bias and criminal investigation that Lady in the Lake tries unconvincingly to depict. Fuller, still teaching at 87, leads us on a tour of the murderous mind with an attractive blend of modesty and steely logic. Among the show’s surprises, her involvement with the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez can change your opinion about that case. Mastermind is a true crime doc you won’t feel guilty about watching. 

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ODDS AND ENDS

For some small-scaled, offbeat films, I recently enjoyed two. The logline of Max’s Knox Goes Away sounds like a bad joke: Contract killer takes on one last case but has to tidy up all the loose ends before dementia overwhelms him. Yeah, it’s a bit of a gimmick. But Michael Keaton, directing himself in the title role, turns in a performance and film with tense, quiet virtues. The supporting cast includes former Atlantan Ray McKinnon, James Marsden and Cold War’s Joanna Kulig.

On Hulu, The Animal Kingdom is a fascinating, French sociological fantasy in which certain people are suddenly, inexplicably mutating into animals. François (Romain Duris) has moved with teen son Émile (Paul Kircher) to a small town following the transformation of his wife into a bear hybrid, now under lockdown in a government facility. In addition to trying to fit into a new school, Émile starts to suspect his own genes are getting a little … wolfish. What could have been a silly metaphor about puberty becomes an interesting fable about society’s eternal drive to divide itself into Us vs. Them. More than a treatise, though, Kingdom offers some lovely, poetic sequences that can linger in your memory. 

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming columns here.