Netflix's The Decameron Gorges Itself on Its Own Gleefully Irreverent ...

A Netflix retelling of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron was not necessarily on my 2024 bingo card—but in hindsight, it probably should have been. Showrunner Kathleen Jordan’s medieval romp is perfectly of our era, despite taking place in the 14th century. After all, it’s held up by none other than the four horsemen of the current media zeitgeist: the anachronistic historical dramedy (see: Dickinson, My Lady Jane, Bridgerton), the “eat the rich” canon (see: White Lotus, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness), the schadenfreude of watching pretty, petty people revert to base instincts while trapped in one place (see: all of reality television, especially Big Brother, Love Island, and Bachelor in Paradise), and the frustrating trend of ever-increasing runtimes (see: everything ever). There’s also a dark horse at its center: it is, unapologetically, about the pandemic—something most media has shied away from depicting.

It helps, surely, that the central pandemic of The Decameron is a far less recent, far more mythologized one. All the soapy drama and raunchy slapstick stem from the characters’ desperate attempts to block out the devastating reality of the Black Death, which continues to ravage Italy with no signs of stopping. For all the liberties the series takes with the source material—and there are many; it is a loose adaptation the way a poncho is a loose rain jacket—it would be near impossible to have any version of The Decameron not revolve around the plague. Boccaccio’s famous book of short stories is framed around it, with the stories in question all being told by a group of nobles attempting to pass the time as they hide out from their native plague-ridden Florence in a beautiful country villa. Like a scooped bagel, Jordan’s adaptation takes the premise of a pandemic-induced Big Brother situation and hollows out the rest, replacing the bready goodness of Boccaccio’s mosaic with lots and lots of filling. And look, I love cream cheese as much as the next Jewish girl, but there is such a thing as too much of it, at which point I just start feeling a little sick. Despite the series’ noble attempts at class commentary and pandemic reverence, The Decameron gorges so thoroughly—and for hour-long episodes at a time—on zany shenanigans of both bloodlust and regular lust that it fails to leave much of a meaningful impression beyond a general sense of excess. It’s not bad, per se; I just wish there was a little less of it. 

The Decameron is a true ensemble show, its characters fighting over screentime and each other in equal measure. Girls’ Zosia Mamet plays Pampinea, the elderly (read: 28) woman of the house, presiding over the villa in the conspicuous absence of her betrothed fiance, whom she’s never actually met. What she lacks in genuine connection to her missing future husband she makes up for in pathological obsession and diabolical power trips, which her handmaiden Misia (Derry Girls’ Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who puts those big eyes of hers to work in every scene) is the foremost recipient of. Their relationship often feels akin to Veep’s Selina Meyer with her bagman Gary Walsh, in all its toxic, mutually dependent glory. While Jackson is the Gary in that dynamic, Tony Hale (of Arrested Development and, yes, Veep fame) dons his typical manic, desperate-to-please, just a tad unhinged typecast to serve as the villa’s steward, a sharp contrast to the steely frustration of Stratilia (Leila Farzad), the long-suffering cook. There’s sexy doctor Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel, who rightfully called his character a “medieval fuckboy”) and his hypochondriac patient, the misogynistic, socially challenged nobleman Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), who would feel right at home on Reddit and in a fedora. And I would be remiss not to mention the lavender marriage between the hyper-religious and hyper-horny Neifile (Lou Gala) and the surprisingly likable opportunist Panfilo (Karan Gill). Stealing the show, though, is Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds, who manages to bring a believable humanity to the eccentric Licisca, a longtime servant to the bratty Filomena (Jessica Plummer) before, on a violent whim, taking the mantle of noblewoman for herself. The show’s plot is simple: 1) These beautifully costumed people are trapped in a gorgeous Italian villa together. 2) Hijinks ensue. 

Like many Netflix originals, The Decameron is often heavily tropey, but unlike its peers, that’s a fact it is gleefully aware of and often explicitly leaning into. And while that’s fun for a time, this purposeful soapiness makes not only its twists and turns but its jokes at large feel all too telegraphed well in advance. While some characters do develop and grow, they’re exactly the ones you would expect; others only sink to lower depths, always in the ways you anticipate. The show is funny in a broad sense—it’s funny to watch people act like idiots, sure. But when the baseline is so out-there, when everything is so over-the-top, it’s hard for any moment to stand out, for any joke to startle a laugh out of the viewer. Especially in Decameron’s early episodes, it feels as if the series has about three jokes that it just repeats at louder and louder decibels, each one outdoing the last iteration in terms of sheer zaniness: God-obsessed Neifile wants to jump a man’s bones (and so does her husband), the insufferable Dioneo is, in fact, insufferable, Pampinea is—gasp!—28, and so on and so forth.

The most unique aspect of The Decameron is, oddly enough, its willingness to engage (at least by proxy) with Covid-19—it’s not the only media that’s tried, certainly, but it comes closer to something approximating success than most others in the pandemic genre, which typically do little more than make you cringe in recognition. Decameron is strange to watch in our (largely) post-Covid existence today; we may feel tempted to roll our eyes at the characters’ attempts to block out the plague by shoving flowers up their nostrils, but it’s hard to judge them too harshly, considering the so-called leader of the free world once suggested injecting bleach into the human body to fight off our own modern virus. There is a certain kinship there, it’s true. However, much of Jordan’s Decameron falls short of truly capturing the experience of the pandemic—the calling card of that era was isolation, so it’s hard to watch a Bachelor in Paradise-esque (and, often, surprisingly violent) free-for-all and see much of ourselves in it. When I say I resorted to my “base instincts” during Covid, I mean I sat on my couch feeling bad about myself while doom-scrolling through Twitter so long my eyes glazed over. I don’t mean that I started trying to set people on fire.

In a lot of ways, Covid was a period of stagnation for many of us privileged enough to successfully quarantine—of not knowing what to do with ourselves, or how to find purpose in a life put on hold by global paranoia and the constant (even more so than usual) fear of death, or how to face the juxtaposition of one class’s self-imposed yet peaceful house arrest with the fact that “essential workers” were forced to labor on regardless. That’s something Boccaccio’s original Decameron excelled at depicting: his is a narrative of people telling each other tales for lack of anything else to do that would distract themselves from the devastation occurring just beyond their walls. The lavish chaos of the stories being told are starkly contrasted with the still, purgatorial existence of the nobles who have nothing to do but sit, talk, wait, and pray, as well as with the horrors faced by those unlucky enough to go without that privilege. Jordan’s Decameron, however, is altogether too busy—both too busy to properly capture that pandemic feeling, and too busy, period. 

Perhaps it’s this too-many-fingers-in-too-many-pies quality that inspired the series to carve out nearly an hour for each episode—meaning that the show clocks in at around eight hours in total, which is… quite a long time, for a show as constantly over-the-top as this. Excess and extremity are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but ironically, they work best when in tandem with decisive restraint—of which The Decameron does not possess much (if it did, perhaps the show would be the half-hour caper it wants so badly to be). Zaniness and wackiness are all well and good, but when everything, from the jokes to the tears, is set at a 10 for eight straight hours, it’s hard to maintain enthusiasm, even when the show does. It gets, frankly, a bit wearying. 

The Decameron is not all wackiness, however; Jordan makes many attempts at genuine feeling towards the end of the series’ run, but like the rest of the show, they’re often far too drawn out—overlong and excessive. Monologues abound in the final episodes, each character breaking down in tears as they finally come to terms with parts of themselves they would rather keep hidden. But just as nonstop, over-the-top antics lose their appeal after the freshness wears off, so too do emotional declarations. I found myself wishing for quieter moments, for a beat of respite once in a while—for connections formed and feelings felt without grand expository signposting to make sure we see they’re there. Amidst all of it, there are genuinely illuminating, great moments, like when a grieving Panfilo is told, point-blank, that everything is terrible and he will never recover, and he stops in his tracks, unable to do anything but laugh at the truth of it. But these bits often feel too few and far between—and they are far between, considering that the episodes are, again, an hour long. 

The Decameron (Jordan’s, not Boccaccio’s) is evidently a lot of things. It’s “pandemic media,” through and through; it’s a lusty slapstick a la medieval!Love Island, as actress Reynolds put it; it’s soapy drama chock full of betrayals and tears; it’s a fairly self-explanatory class commentary, with servants and masters waging catty warfare against each other night and day. One thing it’s not, however, is The Decameron (Boccaccio’s, not Jordan’s). The Netflix series takes the framing of Decameron, but none of its innards, save for a reference or two. And that’s a shame: The Decameron might actually work incredibly well as an anthology show, with the outside plot continuing around the edges of each episode’s “day” of stories. 

I’m certainly no prude for historical reverence (for instance, I loved the sheer ridiculousness of My Lady Jane’s alternative history, wherein the “alternative” in question had a lot to do with the inexplicable presence of Animorphs-style shapeshifters) but by changing the premise so dramatically, Jordan’s Decameron loses not only its namesake, but its potential for originality. Because, when it comes down to it, The Decameron does little that has not already been seen: it’s simply My Lady Jane + Love Island + White Lotus. And since it’s so busy trying to accomplish all three of those oeuvres at once—while also attempting to establish a cohesive pandemic narrative—it falls just a little shy of a success in any one category. It’s fun to glut yourself on, but it’s more an indulgence than a satisfying meal, and by the time you reach the end, it’s hard not to wish you (like the characters) had indulged a little less.

The Decameron is now streaming on Netflix.