The Decameron Review 2024 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
There’s really no excuse for “The Decameron,” the new eight-part Netflix series. There were a number of ways it could have been done right, but it was done wrong. Terribly, ridiculously and pointlessly wrong.
For some background, “The Decameron” is a book from 1353 by Giovanni Boccaccio that became popular a few years ago because of some unfortunate parallels between the world of the book and the world we were experiencing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The book begins with Boccaccio’s harrowing and detailed description of the Black Death plague as experienced in Florence, Italy. Then, the scene shifts to Fiesole outside the city’s borders where 10 young adults — seven women and three men — go to a plush villa to live in natural splendor and wait out the plague.
Over the course of 10 nights, they amuse each other by each telling a story. Different nights have different themes, but most of the stories have to do with sex, and many are fairly risqué. These stories are consistently entertaining, and collectively — though not explicitly — they suggest a yearning to return to the life before the plague.
Pier Paolo Pasolini made a ribald, powerful “The Decameron” in 1971, but his movie, being a movie, could only dramatize a handful of the 100 stories in Boccaccio’s book. In the right hands, the ideal place for “The Decameron” would be television.
A most ambitious TV project would be to dramatize the whole book over the course of 10 seasons. Another way would be to randomly dramatize the best stories — there are dozens of them — and keep doing them for as long as viewers are interested.
Yet another way to approach “The Decameron” would be to concentrate on the people in the villa. This would involve creating new narratives, but that could be interesting. After all, people all over the world have just gone through something enormous. Imagine a series that used a medieval framework to explore the parallels between past and present.
Instead, what we get from Netflix’s “The Decameron” is pure idiocy, the worst of both worlds. Show creator Kathleen Jordan has the characters (played by comic actors like Tony Hale and Zosia Mamet) talking and acting like modern people but creates a series that has no connection with the trauma that modern people have been through. The series also has no connection with the classic, aside from the names of some characters.
The actual plague was as horrifying as any war, but Jordan plays the Florentine opening for laughs. Then, the main characters show up at the villa and act like morons, getting into silly arguments. The series is not informed by an intelligible slant on medieval life or human nature. Calling it “The Decameron” is destructive because, in failing to adapt the book, Jordan precludes anybody else from attempting a coherent, responsible treatment of the material for the next decade, at least.
The truth is, we have not processed the pandemic experience. COVID-19 sort of trailed off without going away, and at a certain point, we realized that daily life had become close to pre-pandemic life. But the processing, the taking stock through art, has not yet happened. We’re just slowly forgetting the Zoom cocktails, the washing of our hands until they hurt, the giving each other haircuts and the longing for life before March 2020.
“The Decameron” could have been part of the healing, but its creators chose to be flippant about something that we all know, from recent experience, was the farthest thing from a joke.
