10 Public Domain TV Adaptations of the Streaming Era (and Where to Watch Them)
Photos Courtesy of Netflix
You can add “medieval black comedy” to Netflix’s expanding list of programming they hope will make a splashy hit; The Decameron is set to be a rude, soapy, and satirical look at sex, class, and power in the Italian Dark Ages, just under a century before they exploded with a renaissance of art, culture, and all that good blasphemic stuff.
Creative liberties have been taken from the source text, a collection of stories by Renaissance writer Giovanni Boccaccio—trying to explain what Netflix is and why it’s got such a cursed stranglehold on production in the entertainment industry might give Boccaccio a heart attack. Although maybe not, he seemed like a smart and funny guy.
Point being, The Decameron has not adapted a text chosen by a celebrity book club, nor is it a long-gestating attempt to pull off a TV version of a modern classic; it’s based on something in the public domain, dated centuries before the publishing industry took shape. Usually, a text enters the public domain 70 years after the author’s death—for a production studio, this means no copyright acquiring, no living author or estate to humble in adaptation, and a text with such an entrenched cultural reputation that you can be as playful as you want. With public domain adaptations, there’s no chance of a streaming show becoming more popular than something that’s been beloved and canonized for centuries across the world.
The world of copyright-expired literature and buzzy streaming hits seem so alien to each other, but that hasn’t stopped creative writers taking a spin on the delights of the literary public domain canon. To commemorate The Decameron’s arrival, here are 10 series from the streaming era that adapted works from the public domain.
1. Dickensian (2015-2016)
A slightly confused release strategy (depending on where you watch it, Dickensian has either 20 half-hour episodes or 10 hour-long episodes) likely contributed to this never becoming an international hit, but the ambition of this Charles Dickens shared universe crime drama still feels admirable nine years after its premiere. Dickensian (named after the adjective to describe the equal parts satirical and sobering class-conscious style of Victorian powerhouse Charles Dickens) is basically the MCU of books British kids were assigned in English class. There’s only a few English-language authors you could pull this off with, and maybe the stunted life of this series reveals why it’s so difficult. Dickens’ books have been in the public domain for over a century, so feel free to have another go at it if you feel so inclined.
2. Anne with an E (2017-2019)
Canada’s own little red-haired orphan girl got three seasons of island adventures with the sweet, if sometimes grating Anne of Green Gables. It originally aired on Canadian television and was released globally on Netflix, similar to the Alias Grace miniseries that launched the same year as Anne with an E’s first season. Original author Lucy Maud Montgomery passed in 1942, and because copyright laws in Canada allowed copyright to last 50 years after the author’s death (until 2023, when the term was upped to 70 years), Montgomery’s body of work has been free real estate since 1992, meaning Anne with an E was able to dive into the psychological and social conflicts and nuances that the author couldn’t.
3. Sanditon (2018-2023)
Sanditon didn’t just take artistic license with Jane Austen because the text was in the public domain, but because Austen didn’t finish it in the first place. Based on an incomplete manuscript written in the last months of Austen’s life, this ITV-Britbox-PBS collaboration freely admits that running through the same six Austen adaptations is getting a bit stale, and used her eleven completed chapters for three seasons of seaside marriage plots and 19th century social change. Jane Austen’s relationship with copyright is a little less straightforward than other authors on this list because of the publication order of her books, whether or not they were self-published, and the reality of being a female writer in early 19th century England—nevertheless, scholars agree a good two hundred years will do the trick.
4. War of the Worlds (2019-2022)
One of the earliest leading roles of Twisters star Daisy Edgar-Jones was in this contemporary adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 The War of the Worlds, and EPIX wasted no time after Wells’ works entered the public domain in 2017 to roll out a new version. The book tapped into an unsteady Victorian-age anxiety that industrial-scale war was going to explode across continents any day now. Wells was a smart cookie because that’s exactly what happened for, well, the rest of history. The story received timely adaptations throughout the past century, always on the eve or during the outset of huge American conflicts—with Orson Welles’ 1938 hysteria-inducing radio broadcast, the Cold War-era 1953 film, and Steven Spielberg’s 9/11-coded version in 2005. You’d think a series about aliens who die from viral infection would have taken off in the 2020s, but alas.
5. Dracula (2020)
Still channeling the smarmy, oh-so-clever and metatextual vibe of Doctor Who and Sherlock, Steven Moffat teamed up with Mark Gatiss to pen three feature-length takes on Bram Stoker’s definitive vampire text for BBC and Netflix, starring Claes Bang as the sumptuous and seductive Prince of Darkness. Irish author Bram Stoker knows a thing or two about his Dracula copyright infringement: the silent German film Nosferatu ripped him off wholesale 27 years after his book was published. Stoker’s estate (Stoker died in 1912, the copyright expired in 1962) won a lawsuit against Nosferatu’s production company to destroy all copies of Nosferatu, but thankfully replications survived—meaning Nosferatu literally came back from the dead. Seeing as this series was made over 50 years after Stoker’s copyright expired, Moffat et al. were spared such embarrassments.
6. The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)
Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House had its copyright renewed in the United States, but Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw is fair game, as James died in 1916. If you’re Mike Flanagan looking to follow up your runaway Netflix hit The Haunting of Hill House, you’re probably thinking: score! Just as Flanagan made dramatic but thoughtful changes to Jackson’s text, Bly Manor’s story of a governess couped up in a spooky house with chilling children changed its setting, plot, and characters, and made centerstage a queer narrative that felt in tune with the charged and suppressed sexual politics of James’ ghost story.
7. Little Women (2022)
This loose Korean adaptation of Louise May Alcott’s defining American bildungsroman added something that’s been missing from all English-language adaptations up until now: Succession-level scheming. Frequent Park Chan-wook collaborator Jeong Seo-kyeong was behind this loosely inspired (but in the other meaning of the word, super inspired) take on class and inheritance in Korea, taking the impoverished pep of the Marsh sisters and injecting it with secrets, murder, and historical inaccuracies about the Vietnam War. Honestly, there’s probably not enough plot or character similarities between book and K-drama to warrant copyright infringement, but for that to even be a potential issue, Jeong would have to make her series one hundred years ago, before Alcott’s copyright expired.
8. Great Expectations (2023)
After the success of FX’s A Christmas Carol, Steven Knight offered another, admittedly stronger adaptation of Dickens’ work that favored a grungy, tactile atmosphere and general misery hanging over everything—this time under the strong ‘FX on Hulu’ label. Knight’s smash hit series Peaky Blinders is partly responsible for the irritating trend of British actors talking in thick, unintelligible accents in prestige TV, but actor Johnny Harris is given a free pass in this series because Magwitch, the iconic, sympathetic criminal at the center of the novel, actually suits being othered with strange dialects like this. Dickens would be proud.
9. The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)
Mike Flanagan loves a literary adaptation, especially if he gets to put a lil spin on it. This is less easy to do with Stephen King adaptations—because King is alive and annoying about it—than it is to do with public domain authors like Henry James or Edgar Allen Poe, the latter of which is a recurring favorite among horror screenwriters. Meshing pop criticisms of the super-rich and inherited wealth (it was very en Vogue last year) with Poe’s sensual style of dread, Flanagan delivered an overcooked but predictably delightful series that blended many Poe works into something that could only come from a superfan with a vice for monologues.
10. Nautilus (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) (2024)
We’re cheating slightly for our last entry with a series that hasn’t technically come out yet, and won’t ever come out on the streamer it was produced for. (This is despite the fact that we could make a case for several actually released entries: Fire Island loosely adapted Pride & Prejudice, but it was a streaming film, not TV; Les Miserables and Around the World in 80 Days technically never launched on streaming but do illustrate what event TV looks like in Britain: ie. a classic novel adapted with film actors, or something with David Tennant in it.)
Nautilus, a prequel series adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by definitely-dead-for-more-than-70-years author Jules Verne wrapped filming last year, only for Disney+ to announce they wouldn’t bother releasing it (this was also en Vogue last year), putting the series in freefall until AMC picked it up. Clearly, the Walt Disney Company was too focused on how much they’d save by keeping it in a vault without realizing how much they had already saved by not licensing the copyright.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.
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