The idea for Netflix’s extravagantly bawdy updating of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Renaissance dramedy, The Decameron, came to showrunner Kathleen Jordan during the darkest days of the pandemic. She recalls being irritated by the “tone deafness” with which some celebrities responded to Covid – a reference, presumably, to the waking nightmare that was the Gal Gadot Imagine video.
As you may remember from Junior Cert history, the Decameron is set during the Black Death, when strangers take refuge in a Tuscan villa as the world unravels outside. With recent events in mind, Jordan’s message is that a global health disaster doesn’t necessarily bring people together but can instead lay bare the “chasm between the haves and the have-nots”.
Alas, the newly decanted Decameron succeeds only in laying bare the chasm between good and bad television. The tone is adjacent to the insufferably smug social manners dramedy White Lotus, blended with elements of late 20th-century sex farce – a sort of Carry On up the Bubonic Plague.
One of the few things the wildly unfunny romp has in its favour is an engaging cast. They’re an admirably diverse bunch – though not so diverse as to include any Italian actors – and, as is traditional, that diversity does not extend to the accents, where British cadences dominate.
A rare exception is Derry Girls’ star Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who plays Misia, handmaid to irritating aristocrat Pampinea (Zosia Mamet). Jackson does her best, but she is up against a ridiculous proto-hipster haircut and a script that asks her to do little beyond scowl and throw resentful daggers towards her mistress – who has come to marry the master of the house (unaware he recently succumbed to the dreaded buboes).
The other characters are similarly slapdash and simplistic. The comedic skills of Amar Chadha-Patel are wasted as he plays bland hunk Dioneo, while the French actress Lou Gala is landed with the thankless role of god-bothering idiot Neifile. The only cast member with anything to chew on is Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds, who plays a grandee with a secret.
Jordan works hard to keep the mood playful and spruces the soundtrack with modern pop. But even here, the lack of subtlety is frustrating. When a handmaid shoves her mistress off a bridge and steals her identity, the soundtrack strikes up with Master and Servant by Depeche Mode. It’s yet another annoying flourish in a show to be avoided like the plague.