The Decameron Review: Netflix’s Black Death Comedy is Fizzy if Occasionally Uneven Fun

On paper, a television series centered on the Black Death — the colloquial name for the bubonic plague pandemic that wiped out almost half of Europe’s population in the mid-to-late 14th century — isn’t something that you’d normally expect to generate a lot of laughs. But don’t tell Netflix’s The Decameron that.

The eight-episode series, set in medieval Italy, is remarkably forthright about the widespread fear and death the plague brought with it. But from its first moments, The Decameron never takes itself too seriously, using over-the-top characters and frequently silly comedy to wrestle with timely issues of class, religion, and misinformation.

Though its story is uneven (particularly in the series’ final episodes), it’s hard to argue with its ridiculous sense of fun — or its surprising moments of genuine emotional pathos. 

The Decameron is (very, very) loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century collection of tales which range from love stories and lessons in morality to bawdy sexual adventures and crass jokes.

Boccaccio’s work provides the closest thing we have to a contemporary account of the plague outbreak in Florence, chronicling how people reacted to the swiftly spreading sickness and the staggering number of deaths that followed. 

The Netflix version steals the basic beats of this premise: a group of nobles flees the plague-infested city and hides away in a ritzy villa in the countryside where they hope to remain healthy in isolation.

Lady Pampinea (Zosia Mamet), an unmarried, twenty-eight-year-old (gasp!!), is betrothed to Viscount Leonardo, the owner of Villa Santa. She arrives in the countryside with her sizeable dowry and her obsessively devoted handmaid Misia (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), only to find her intended is technically not in residence. 

Undaunted, Pampinea takes over the role of lady of the house and is joined by a steady stream of guests, including Panfilo (Karan Gill) and Neifile (Lou Gala), a married couple who practice celibacy thanks to her religious devotion and his sexual preference for men.

There’s also the sickly and awkward lord Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin) who’s brought his personal (and very attractive) doctor Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) along to advise him on everything from potential medical needs to the ins and outs of wooing women.

Rich Filomina (Jessica Plummer) earns an invite because she is technically Leonardo’s cousin, but when she and her handmaiden get into a physical argument on the way to his estate, the extremely fed-up servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds) not-so-accidentally pushes her mistress off a bridge.

Seizing the opportunity to steal her identity, she arrives at Villa Santa disguised as a noble, and some of  The Decameron’s sharpest and most incisive moments involve Licisca-turned-Filomena’s attempts to navigate the minefields of life as a member of a class to which she does not technically belong.

Wine, food, and sex abound as these privileged few indulge in all manner of activities to try and distract themselves from worldly horrors happening just outside their doors. Meanwhile, their servants — put-upon steward Sirisco (Tony Hale) and overworked cook Stratilia (Leiza Farzard) — simmer in quiet resentment, struggling to keep up with their increasingly excessive demands, 

But as society begins to break down both inside and outside the villa, traditional assumptions are challenged and the established rules of order begin to dissolve in fascinating new ways. 

The parallels to our own experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic are sharply drawn, as the rich attempt to party where the rest of the world burns. But as long-held inhibitions and expectations fall away, characters seize the freedom to explore what a different kind of world might look like.

Though much of The Decameron revolves around making fun of the ridiculous lives of the idle rich, the show doesn’t turn its characters into pure caricatures either. The series manages to viciously skewer its characters’ worst excesses and moral failings even as it reminds us of their heart and humanity. 

Jackson steals much of the show as a handmaiden torn between her genuine devolution to (and seeming affection for) Pampinea and her desire for a life with more agency of her own. Mamet, in the occasionally thankless role of the most obviously obnoxious of the noble group, grounds Pampinea’s shallow desire for approval and status in genuine loneliness and fear.

But it is Reynolds who is given the series’ clearest arc, playing a character who literally gets the chance to try on the costume of a different life and showing us a Licisca constantly chafing under the falsehoods and performativity of the change she thought she wanted. Her growth throughout these eight episodes is deeply satisfying to watch.

The series’ earliest episodes are its most entertaining, almost solely because the entire cast is almost always onscreen together and their comedic chemistry is at its liveliest and most unpredictable.

As the group fractures over problems ranging from revealed secrets to the arrival of distant relatives and religious mercenaries, the characters are increasingly siloed into specific groups in ways that are not always to the show’s benefit. (If only because some of their various subplots are just a lot more interesting than others.)

As period dramas go, The Decameron isn’t a show that’s particularly concerned with period accuracy.

The characters wear outlandish, bright costumes and speak in contemporary English; the series’ soundtrack is full of modern-day bangers from artists like Depeche Mode and New Order.

It features significant queer representation, as well as body and sex positivity. There’s a fair amount of blood and death, but then again, it is a show about the plague, after all.

While The Decameron’s final episodes are often less fun (and less coherent) than those that came before, the show still ranks as one of the summer’s most unexpectedly entertaining surprises. Maybe, even now, all we can do in the face of death is laugh.

What did you think of The Decameron? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The Decameron is now streaming on Netflix.

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