‘The Decameron’ Gives Sex, Class, and the Plague a Contemporary Spin

When it comes to satire, a handful of topics are evergreen: sex, politics, and making fun of rich people. The 14th-century Italian story collection The Decameron is no exception, and neither is the 21st-century Netflix series very loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s plague-era masterpiece. Our own plague era may or may not be over, depending on who you ask. But the wealth gap just keeps getting bigger, and mocking out-of-touch elites who feast and frolic while the masses suffer will, sadly, not become irrelevant any time soon.

And the sex? Both versions of The Decameron delight in bedroom romps, although Kathleen Jordan’s take on the material is more invested in the relationships between its characters than Boccaccio’s. Rather than using a gaggle of nobles hiding out in a lavish villa as the Black Death burns through the countryside as a framing device, Netflix’s Decameron stays with 10 core characters—give or take a few peasants and mercenaries—throughout its eight-episode run. This ends up becoming a liability, as the series assumes that if we spend enough time with these rotten people, we’ll grow to love them. The assumption is incorrect.

The series starts off appealingly morbid, the camera following a cart piled with dead bodies over the cobblestone streets of Firenzia (a.k.a. Florence, Italy). Just before it’s dumped into a river, a peasant pulls a pair of boots off of a corpse, ecstatic about their quality. It’s dark and silly in a Monty Python and the Holy Grail type of way, a comedic note The Decameron will return to throughout the series. This glib attitude toward death and violence combine with vicious wit, soap-opera lust, unhinged slapstick, Shakespearean mistaken identities, and misjudged sentimentality as the series wears on.

In the first episode, we meet four parties preparing to depart for the lavish country estate of Villa Santa, at the invitation of its master Viscount Leonardo: insecure, demanding Pampinea (Zosia Mamet) and her devoted handmaid Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson); sexless, wealthy married couple Neifile (Lou Gala) and Panfilo (Karan Gill); clueless hypochondriac Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) and his con-artist physician Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel); and spoiled Filomena (Jessica Plummer) and her servant/punching bag Licisca (Tanya Reynolds).

Each of these characters has their own motivations for escaping the city, and “not dying of the plague” is lower on many lists than one might expect. These people are rich! That basically makes them immortal—right? It certainly makes them entitled, which leads to some satisfying upstairs/downstairs farce as servants become nobles, nobles become servants, and commoners with common sense like steward Sirisco (Tony Hale) and cook Stratilia (Leila Farzad) coddle the overfed and overeducated adult children in their care.

In its first half, The Decameron is largely a sex comedy whose bawdy pansexual pleasures are enhanced by the lavish set design and costumes. (Forbidden passion is even more delicious when it’s clad in a velvet codpiece and two-tone hose.) Then the nobility—who up to this point have been painted in different shades of craven, clueless, and cruel—start showing their soft underbellies in a play for “heart” that undermines the class conflict that’s driven much of the comedy up to that point. Some redemption arcs are more unearned than others, but only Mamet’s Pampinea has the guts to remain reprehensible until the end.

Mamet and Hale also stand out for their ability to embody ridiculous characters without turning them into cartoons. A sequence where Hale escapes Villa Santa in the company of a duck is hilarious, and Mamet is more convincing than most when she begins to feel vague pangs of guilt for how awfully she’s treated Misia over the years. It helps that neither of them really learn anything over the course of eight episodes, allowing them to maintain the psychotic energy that makes the first few episodes of The Decameron so much fun.

The Decameron belongs to a growing group of TV shows (see also: My Lady Jane, The Great, Harlots) that portray historical events from a contemporary point of view. The soundtrack, featuring such cool-Gen-X-aunt favorites as New Order, Sparks, and Nine Inch Nails, is typical of the subgenre. So are absurd-but-accurate historical details like the onions characters use to purge their noses of smells they believe carry the plague. Both of these touches add personality to the series, while others—like, say, lesbian sex as a shortcut to anachronistic moral enlightenment—add nothing but cringe. Perhaps that’s callous to say, but the funniest parts of this series are also the callous ones. Call it tough love.