How ‘The Decameron’ Became the Summer’s Weirdest Hit Show

The Decameron has all the makings of a great sleeper hit: unexpected source material, abundant quirky humor, and sneakily moving performances. Netflix’s limited series also boasts the bone structure of Gosford Park or Knives Out: a motley crew of nobles and servants converge at a luxurious country villa outside Florence during an outbreak of the Black Death in the mid-1300s. A uniquely medieval type of sexy, silly, risky hijinks ensue, and in accordance with the laws governing cheeky historical fantasias, it’s all cued to gleefully anachronistic needle drops.

The Decameron is very, very, very loosely based on—what else?—The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s popular 14th-century collection of satirical short stories about how people reacted to the seemingly inescapable pandemic of the time. Series creator and showrunner Kathleen Jordan (Teenage Bounty Hunters) isn’t so much adapting the original as using the source material as a leaping-off point to explore questions about morality, emergency preparedness, and bacchanalia. Typical comedy stuff.

Jordan and Tony Hale, who weaves formidable comedy chops into his performance as the increasingly beleaguered and disillusioned estate steward Sirisco, sat down with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed for a chat about the enduring appeal of stories about how extreme circumstances shape human behavior, for better and for worse.

As deeply idiosyncratic projects often do, The Decameron began with an unusual obsession. In this case, Jordan’s “long-held fascination with bubonic plague” was the jumping-off point. The self-described “really dark child” spent fourth grade writing “two different book reports” about the disease that repeatedly tore through medieval Europe.

While “trying to find a way to tell a story about a pandemic” in such a way that “it didn’t feel too icky and close to what we were experiencing” when COVID-19 first emerged, Jordan found her way to Boccaccio’s work. She drew on themes, characters, and premises, ultimately “taking the elevator pitch of the book and tweaking it a little bit” to weave the original, very episodic stories into one overarching narrative about power, love, sex, religion, identity, and humanity.

These themes are her calling card, something executive producer Jenji Kohan (Orange is the New Black, Weeds) noticed right away on reading Jordan’s first script. The character Neifile (Lou Gala), a pious woman whose quest for self-understanding leads her into a sexual liaison is similar to the main characters of Jordan’s previous series for Netflix, the deeply lamented one-season wonder Teenage Bounty Hunters.

The clear connection between the two series prompted Kohan’s quip that “Horny Christian will be the archetype in the seminar on your work in 20 years.” Fair enough, says Jordan, who “grew up in a really religious community” and found her way naturally back to exploring “the way that we hate women is that we use religion to put them in a box, when really, religion and sex can go together.”

Boccaccio’s page-turner is The Decameron’s wellspring, but Jordan enthusiastically rattles off a list of other films and TV series that she considers in conversation with this project. It’s a heady brew: “I’d love for people to be thinking of Amadeus and The Favourite, a little bit of Monty Python or Blackadder sprinkled in, and maybe a touch of The Princess Bride.” She’s just getting into a riff on the influence of Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey when Hale chimes in, “I think Love Island [is in there].”

Jordan agrees, sharing that “in the writers room, we did a lot of referencing of Survivor, and when I was writing the pilot, I was also watching a lot of Bachelor in Paradise.” Put it all in a blender and the resulting series is full of intense moments but still leans strongly toward the warm humor and hard-won affection at the heart of any good dramedy. The friends the characters make (and lose—this is a story about the Black Death, after all) along the way are what really count for the core group of eight guests who arrive to shelter at Count Leonardo’s villa.

Hale explains that prior to the wave of bubonic plague, the highly competent Sirisco “was incredibly loyal to his master”, but following Leonardo’s death, “he’s just trying to manage, but at the same time, clinging to somebody else he can be loyal to.” The process repeats itself several times as Sirisco allies himself first with Leonardo’s fiancée Pampinea, (Zosia Mamet) and later, disillusioned by Pampinea’s cruel and self-delusional insistence on being accepted as Leonardo’s heir and future mother of his (alleged, posthumously conceived) child, later attaching himself to Leonardo’s drunk and violently carousing cousin Ruggiero.

The churning, propulsive plot twists and character alliances shift over and over for everyone, starting in the pilot as clever servants Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) and Licisca (Tanya Reynolds), and scheming doctor Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) all subvert their spoiled, clueless employers’ orders. They’re making repeated life or death decisions, which are all in a day’s work: secretly stowing an ailing lover in luggage, hurling a demanding mistress off a bridge and stealing her identity, and feeding a very silly noble a steady diet of mostly mild poisons.

The cast is rounded out by the queer and loving husband Panfilo (Karan Gill), grandiose nobleman Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), cluelessly imperious Filomena (Jessica Plumber), and Sirisco’s beleaguered colleague Stratilia (Leila Farzad), who has had it up to here with these aristocrats before we even meet her in the first episode. Both Farzad and Hale’s performances ground the series in a recognizable emotional reality.

In the series’ final episodes, Sirisco reconnects with his core humanity, thanks to “the authenticity of his connection with his friend”, the reflexively kind Arriguccio, (Dustin Demri-Burns). The survivors, telling and enjoying stories together in The Decameron’s final scene, is a lovely, earned moment of temporary relief, and is a callback to the gathering Leonardo originally planned.

Hale hopes that “people see both the dark and the light of each of these characters,” noting that they all reflect what a “mixed bag” of emotions and morality we all are. The extremity of The Black Death should, he says, remind viewers of the early days of the pandemic, where “you saw the worst of humanity, you saw the best of humanity. When the dark was that dark, you saw the light even more.”

Jordan agrees, emphasizing a distinction between The Decameron and multi-season historical dramedies: “This show is a limited series. We went in with the intention to write it into the ground, so we would have failed if any of these characters failed to significantly change over the eight episodes.”

The versatile actors, paired with multidimensional characters is a combination that creates believable journeys within The Decameron’s absurdly and anachronistically heightened reality. Initially shallow, foolish characters like Tindaro and Panfilo discover unsuspected depth and purpose after experiencing the agony of loss. They’re able to dig deep to protect those who remain, giving their friends a better chance at survival by hurling everything they’ve got (including a pestilence-riddled corpse) at the series’ Final Boss, a group of bloodthirsty mercenaries who arrive to plunder the villa.

Ultimately, Jordan is perhaps most “excited for people to see” the complexity of her actors’ performances. For his part, Hale has a daring prediction for how The Decameron will find its most devoted audience: “The fact that I wear wool tights is really going to make an impact.”