Netflix’s Audacious Riff on The Decameron Is Tons of Fun. But Is It Really The Decameron?

In the annus horribilis of 2020, as COVID-19 ravaged the world, a generation that had yet to experience a cataclysm of precisely this nature and scale turned to art for insight into how we might survive it. Contemporary speculative fiction about lethal pathogens, from Ling Ma’s novel Severance to Steven Soderbergh’s movie Contagion, surged in popularity. Readers also turned to tales of pestilence past: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. But no dusty tome got a bigger boost than Giovanni Boccaccio’s early-Renaissance classic The Decameron. Virtual book clubs sprung up to dissect it. The New York Times commissioned stories from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Tommy Orange for its own update, The Decameron Project. “Six Centuries Later, The Decameron Is Suddenly the Book of the Moment,” reported that self-proclaimed arbiter of relevance, Vogue.

Set amid the Black Death that decimated Europe in the mid-14th century, Boccaccio’s masterpiece follows 10 young nobles fleeing a plague outbreak in Florence that would ultimately reduce the city’s population by half. To pass the time in their rural idyll, they tell the stories that make up the bulk of the book—one apiece for 10 days, hence the title. The consensus interpretation of The Decameron has long been that it illustrates the unique power of storytelling to buoy humanity through history’s most devastating moments. The author Rivka Galchen sums up this reading in her introduction to The Decameron Project: “Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.”

Kathleen Jordan, the creator of Netflix’s The Decameron, came away from her pandemic-era reading of Boccaccio with a very different understanding. What if, her black comedy proposes, the book’s true timeless message is that, whether they’re Florentine aristocrats in 1348 or Manhattan financiers in 2020, the privileged will always blithely abandon their less fortunate neighbors when the plague comes to town? Jordan has stripped The Decameron of its stories, choosing instead to riff on the frame narrative. Somehow, her irreverence pays off. As successful as it is on its own terms, the series raises the question of which derivative works, devoured by platforms hungry to capitalize on trending intellectual property (especially if it predates the advent of copyright law), even deserve to be called adaptations.

The Decameron without stories sounds about as promising as The Inferno without circles of hell, but if anyone can pull off an impossible premise, it’s Jordan and her fellow executive producer, Jenji Kohan. With Orange Is the New Black, Kohan reshaped a middle-class white writer’s prison memoir into a dark yet vibrant ensemble dramedy of carceral injustice starring the Black and brown women disproportionately ensnared in that system. Jordan and Kohan’s frustratingly short-lived Teenage Bounty Hunters proved that, when executed with enough warmth and wit, even the stupidest-sounding concept can yield a wonderful show.

The same audacious humor suffuses The Decameron. Like the original, the series opens in the corpse-strewn wasteland of 1348 Florence, as a handful of nobles and their servants prepare to skip town to wait out the plague at a luxurious country villa. The characters share names with Boccaccio’s brigade, but little else. Zosia Mamet and Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson are perfectly paired as Pampinea, a bossy 28-year-old so desperate to marry, she’s accepted a proposal from the villa’s owner sight unseen, and her weirdly loyal maid, Misia. Tindaro (Douggie McMeekin), a pompous hypochondriac who has just inherited his family’s fortune, arrives with his hot physician, Dioneo (Amar Chadha-Patel) in tow. Canny Panfilo (Karan Gill) and pious Neifile (Lou Gala) are the married lovebirds—but neither can stop staring at Dioneo. Then there’s bratty Filomena (Jessica Plummer) and her long-suffering servant Licisca (Sex Education standout Tanya Reynolds), whose mistress gets her to leave the deathbed of Filomena’s own father by claiming he’s already dead.

Upon arriving at the villa, the party finds their host absent but his accommodating steward (the great Tony Hale) and surly, noble-hating cook (Leila Farzad, a highlight of the season’s second half) at their service. No matter; the rich kids are determined to have a fun holiday even as the plague shreds the fabric of civilization. “We are here to eat and drink and move into a bright new future,” announces the delusional Pampinea—who, as the ostensible soon-to-be lady of the manor, eagerly and a bit dictatorially assumes the role of hostess.

That is precisely what they do for a while, guzzling wine and indulging in the kind of innocently illicit sexcapades that Boccaccio’s virtuous characters only told tall tales about. (Like most streaming series, The Decameron’s episodes and season are a smidge longer than they need to be.) As their employees labor to satisfy the bosses’ absurd whims, the nobles seize the moment of societal flux as an opportunity for self-discovery. “If the pestilence has taught us anything,” says a character trying to lure Panfilo out of the closet, “it’s that we’re to choose the parts of ourselves we wish to keep and the parts we wish to throw away.”

It’s a great philosophy if you’re confident you’ll survive. But, as viewers who’ve lived through the past four years already know, the assumption that wealth and seclusion alone are infallible defenses against a pandemic attacking society from all angles is hopelessly naive. In truth, the villa has never been a safe refuge, and its gates are useless against not just the infected but also the marauding mobs it has empowered. One great thrill of Jordan’s lively, earthy, and hilarious Decameron is watching the spoiled discover that, for the filthy horde circling their oasis, they are the spoils.

Is the show really The Decameron, though? In fairness, it would be virtually impossible to adapt the 860-page, 100-story volume in full. When admirers borrow from it, as Shakespeare did with All’s Well That Ends Well and, just a few years ago, filmmaker Jeff Baena did in The Little Hours, they usually appropriate just a story for two. English translations of the book have often been heavily abridged, while even relatively faithful adaptations like the Italian auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1971 film The Decameron depict just a small selection of its tales. Still, there’s something about the idea of taking Boccaccio’s title but leaving his stories that doesn’t sit right.

Hollywood’s eagerness to slap a familiar, if unearned, title on every project is one red flag. Yet Jordan has a solid justification for her approach. While the brief stories didn’t strike her as right for TV, she has said that she “loved the armature and skeleton” around them, “this idea of a group of wealthy people who think that they can escape a pandemic.” It’s through this COVID-informed interpretation that she accesses the soul of Boccaccio’s work. Her Decameron doesn’t just reference the famous story where an adulterer hides from his lover’s husband in a barrel; it also captures the author's ribald sense of humor, his scorn for a corrupt Church, the glee with which his characters scheme and transgress, his prescient insight about a pandemic’s potential to remake society.

It isn’t fidelity to the letter, or even the basic structure, of the source material that makes a worthy adaptation. What matters more is that the retelling embodies the spirit of the work that inspired it. In the best cases, among which I’d surely count Netflix’s Decameron, it also challenges received wisdom about that work. As Licisca, the show’s sharpest character, notes once the villa has begun its descent into chaos: “Independence is the greatest luxury.” Her revelation applies as much to a 21st century TV creator adapting classic literature as it does to a servant fleeing her tyrannical mistress while the plague consumes their city.