There’s Nothing Quite Like The Decameron

It’s thrilling to see something so idiosyncratic on TV. If only it were more successful.

In the first episode of The Decameron, Netflix’s new series about a group of medieval Italians eluding the plague at a Tuscan villa, a wailing man clutching his beloved’s corpse galvanizes an aging spinster’s search for love; someone gets hurled into a river, inspiring a very silly identity swap; and a maidservant named Misia pivots from sketch-comedy levels of obedience into excruciating grief. In other words, The Decameron is an odd hang, careening between hilarity, tragedy, horniness, and a fatalism so extreme it’s almost giddy. There’s no easy comp for it on television right now, no major line of influence for this show that can barely settle into a genre for more than a scene or two and structures its plot in hop-skipping jolts of alarm and reprieve. It’s thrilling to watch something so idiosyncratic. But it’s also not entirely successful.

The Netflix series from showrunner Kathleen Jordan is inspired by the medieval Italian text by Boccaccio about a group of young nobles isolating from the Black Death who tell stories to pass the time: love stories, raunchy comedies, tragedies, morality tales. The original work is a frame story with very little plot for its ten narrators, but that structure disappears in the Netflix adaptation, although elements of its emotional impact do seep into the show’s tonal mixture and general character types. The TV series stays with those central nobles and their servants (very, very loosely adapted from the narrators of the original work), and the action of the season follows what happens to them as they all converge on this villa for the marriage of Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) to Don Leonardo (Davy Eduard King), desperate for some distraction from the plague consuming Florence.

There’s so much to love about the show that follows. The Decameron is full of ideas about its resonance with contemporary events, but it plays them out without ever tipping its hand too aggressively or betraying its own historical setting for the sake of making a point. There’s humor and a wry directness in this story about aristocrats holing up in immense luxury while their servants labor to provide them with lavish feasts and the world collapses around them. The servants are vastly more in touch with reality, but they’re also caught in a class system that has real benefits for them, and they don’t want to leave. Much of the series plays like a farce: People get stowed away in wine casks, take on stolen identities, and make far-fetched attempts to take control of the enormous estate. Everyone’s hiding secrets, and parts of The Decameron are built like a comedy of errors, with someone’s absurd decision — burying a body in the garden and pretending that character is still alive, for example — spreading out into ridiculous results for everyone else.

But there’s a whistling past the graveyard element, too, and as the season goes on, the show swerves deeper and deeper into existential angst and overwhelming grief. The body count rises. Desperation sets in. All the topsy-turvy playfulness of maids pretending to be ladies, or an absurdly devout wife lusting after a shirtless member of the lower classes, starts to get snagged on jagged truths about how grim everything is. Most of that whiplash is purposeful, and the performers play the high-wire tone remarkably well. Mamet’s Pampinea, a cheerful monster whose hopes of marriage are dwindling as the population of Florence rapidly falls dead around her, and Saoirse-Monica Jackson as her devoted servant nearly vibrate off the screen with pent-up anxiety. Amar Chadha-Patel makes a perfectly swoon-worthy Dioneo, doctor to Douggie McMeekin’s Tindaro, who is so obnoxious it’s hard to understand how he survives beyond the first night.

At its best, The Decameron is able to capture the bizarre and familiar contemporary sensation that too many intense feelings are happening at the same time. The characters are perpetually trying to juggle their own petty needs with a sense of looming doom, and there’s almost never time to process one person’s death before another urgent crisis arrives. There are moments of luxury and hilarity inside the estate walls, even as everyone’s painfully aware of all the death around them, closer than any want to admit. There’s also a constant prickling discomfort with the overwhelming pain and poverty and how unfair it is that some people have a haven they can hide inside. The Decameron doesn’t need to make direct comparisons to now; the pieces are not hard to put together.

But just as often, the show’s unpredictable mix of plots and tones sits a little too long before moving somewhere new, or it jolts somewhere suddenly without a sense of purpose. While Pampinea freaks out about what’s being served for dinner, Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) is desperately trying to keep a secret and Dioneo’s dealing with an explosive Tindaro, so everyone’s annoyed when bandits pound on the door, interrupting them, and this happens often enough that the bandits start to feel repetitive rather than like the looming threat they’re meant to be. When some characters die, it feels perfectly sad; when others die, it feels like a tone the show is now missing and not sure how to replace. In total, The Decameron feels stretched beyond its ability to sustain any momentum, with early events surrounded with too much padding and later events appearing like sudden escalations that needed more time to build. The pieces are all there, in other words, but they don’t always fit together as well as they should.

All of this still makes The Decameron one of the more interesting new Netflix series of the last year, especially when some of its established dramas are doing well but newer shows have failed to take hold. And especially in the first half of the season, The Decameron is fun enough to appeal to audiences who are not in the mood for a pandemic-hued bummer. The heart of the show, though, is in what happens when shit gets real. The members of this silly medieval death farce are forced to realize that no matter how far they try to run, there’s no escape from mortality.