Comedies, like horror stories, have two tasks: to encourage an immediate emotional response from their audiences and not overstay their welcome. Laughing and screaming take a lot out of a person, so it’s best when the thing that’s causing the laughing and/or the screaming is economical. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself bored during a scary movie, or checking your watch to see when the latest rom-com or crime caper will be over. The word “bloat” has long been synonymous with the name of a certain, red-and-black-branded streaming service, and yet, despite being based on a famously giant book, episodes of Netflix’s new medieval romp The Decameron have no business clocking in at 40-to-50 minutes.
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (which he nicknamed “The Human Comedy,” as opposed to Dante’s “Divine” one) is a collection of 100 short stories sandwiched between the exploits of a group of nobles and their servants waiting out the Black Plague of 1348 in a Florentine villa. Gathered in what’s essentially a 14th-century quarantine pod, they pass the time weaving tales of romance, comedy, tragedy, and downright debauchery. Adapting each of these stories, with all their disparate settings and characters, would be much too large a task for any one TV show. (Besides: Can you imagine Netflix ordering 100 episodes of anything?). Instead, The Decameron follows whatever increasingly tiresome antics the people in the villa get up to during their time away from society. There’s a mistress and her servant who do a “The Prince and the Pauper” identity swap, a woman obsessed with the now-dead husband she never met, a beefy physician who catches the eyes of nearly everyone, an ambitious politician unable to satisfy his wife, and an eligible and wealthy bachelor who hates women. It’s the sort of motley group Shakespeare would envy, and their intersecting plotlines take plenty of cues from his comedies of errors.
The Decameron is funny, for a while. The problems that these characters cook up for each other start at outrageous and only build from there. Tony Hale is wonderful as Sirisco, the house’s perpetually exasperated steward, set upon by a gang of selfish nobles and their conniving staff who are as ravenous as the rats carrying the plague. (The rodents are honored in the show’s charming animated opening credits.) An early episode’s plot orbits deeply horny yet deeply pious Neifile (Lou Gala) who, determined to make her crush fall in love with her, tumbles down a well and refuses to come out until the object of her affections can “save” her.
Much of the show’s humor operates under the assumption that it’s always funny when old-timey people act like we do, using modern slang and contemporary expressions. While flirting, doctor Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) compliments a woman by saying, “I get the feeling that you’re not like other girls.” This type of comedy is something of a trend right now, with shows like Dickinson, The Great, and Our Flag Means Death putting meme jokes into the mouths of people wearing jerkins and petticoats and codpieces. It can be worth a laugh, but it’s unfortunately the only thing The Decameron seems to have up its voluminous sleeves.
There’s just not enough material to justify its nearly hour-long episodes, almost all of which grind to a halt somewhere in the middle thanks to indulgent montages set to pop music – a common ill of Netflix originals that results in a lot of needle drops from the 1980s and ’90s here. The middle of the season churns as the ensemble expands and the alliances and friendships between the established characters shift around just so the episodes can move forward. Zosia Mamet and Saoirse-Monica Jackson are the only cast members who manage to embody the grotesqueries of The Decameron’s critique of class and privilege. Their characters – a status-obsessed noblewoman and her maidservant who’s close to breaking under the strain, respectively – practically melting into sweaty, dirty, animalistic forms before their comrades’ eyes and our own.
It’s an interesting idea, to take something that seems stodgy and old-fashioned and try to modernize it. But by its final episodes, The Decameron is trying to sell us on one of the mustiest of saws: in times of hardship, society’s walls and mores break down, and we discover we’re all the same. Now that we’ve lived through a plague time of our own, we know that that’s categorically untrue. But this is all The Decameron has to say, making its jokes ring ever more hollow – and fester like boils.
