You know the kinds of shows we have too many of? Sitcoms where 87 per cent of the action is set in an incredibly colourful apartment and one character is “the wacky one”. Cop shows where the hero has an estranged daughter and a disappointed wife. Medical dramas with hospitals staffed by implausibly attractive doctors.
On the one hand, it is a blessing that The Decameron, created by Kathleen Jordan, is none of these things. Set in 14th century Italy, it is a black comedy about a bunch of people who flee to a villa to escape The Black Death. You’d be hard pushed to argue that we have too many of these. On the other hand, it’s a tedious eight-episode series that is about five episodes too long.
Every form of entertainment today seems to be based on a book, and The Decameron is no exception. Its source material is a collection of short stories written by Giovanni Boccaccio in the wake of The Plague. Though this show, like the book, was written shortly after a life-changing pandemic, The Decameron doesn’t draw an explicit link between the two periods of time to make any sort of satirical points, which feels like a missed opportunity.
Though the title of the show is terrible, the titles are wonderful, with a host of black animated rats collectively morphing into different shapes. And the opening minutes of the series are promising: in a filthy, frantic Firenze, a boy kills a raven with a stone, mistakenly calling it a chicken and taking it away for lunch. Presumably partly because it is easier to film at length in a villa than in the streets, however, we don’t stay in Firenze for long.
Not long after the show and its cast of characters migrate to the villa in the countryside – as they are obliged to, following the structure of the book – the series loses a great deal of its appeal. The villa includes people like Pampinea (Zosia Mamet), a selfish woman soon to marry the master of the villa; Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), her devoted handmaiden; Licisca (the stand-out Tanya Reynolds), a servant pretending to be her lady; Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a hopeless buffoon; and Dioeno (Amar Chadha-Patel), his suave and horny doctor.
The fact that there is a terrible plague in the air often feels almost academic to the characters, who spend their time fucking or fighting. Watching them do so has diminishing returns, for a variety of reasons. One is that there is never any real sense of jeopardy – the tone of the show is neither comedy nor drama, leaving it in an uneasy middle ground. Another is that there is the inescapable sense that characters are simply passing time, their squabbles and hook-ups the result of boredom. Most urgently, however, although there are some superlative actors involved, the script simply isn’t up to scratch. Tony Hale (of Arrested Development fame) gets an impressive number of laughs with what he is given; Leila Farzad (of I Hate Suzie fame) is criminally wasted. It’s easy to see why the actors signed up but what could have been punchy and punchline-heavy is bloated and indulgent.
We wish we could tell you that The Decameron was better; that this was the show to draw parallels between the 14th and 21st centuries and truly tell us something profound about the way that pandemics affect group psychology. Unfortunately, its cast and its impressive production budget cannot quite overcome the various problems weighing it down.
‘The Decameron’ is streaming now on Netflix