The Decameron’t

One thing that Netflix’s The Decameron series has going for it, at first glance, it’s that it’s unique. Based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s book of the same name, published in 1300s Italy, it has plenty of elements we’ve seen in other shows: there’s a plague, from which the main characters are trying to escape. We’ve seen that in anything from The Last Ship to The Walking Dead. There are a lot of lords and ladies giving themselves over to the urges of the flesh, as in The Great or The Tudors. Peasants dress in rags, check, the clergy are silly or devious: the elements don’t differ all that much.

But what The Decameron has going for it is that its source is one of the great works of Western literature, a compendium of tales by turn bawdy and sacrilegious and philosophical. The scope of those tales is the scope of human experience, if taken from a satirical point of view. And this show, they tell us, is a comedy. So, we might hope, it might do something more than the rest.

The show, though, is too cowardly to tell Boccaccio straight. The most censored tale from his book is “Putting the Devil Back in Hell,” in which a young virgin sets out into the desert to learn how best to serve God. She ends up in the cell of a young hermit, who may at first intend to teach her the Lord’s way, but soon surrenders to the temptations of the flesh. He, the hermit (as he tells her), possesses the Devil, which much to her alarm stands upright from his naked body, while the girl possesses Hell, between her legs: and, he convinces her, they will best serve God by putting the Devil back in Hell. The girl before long develops a craving for this devotion beyond what the hermit, living on roots and water, can provide, and he longs to be rid of her.

It all gets settled when she, an heiress, comes back home to an arranged marriage; but before that takes place, she tells the women of the town how she served God in the desert, and what joy that gave her. They laugh, and tell her that in her marriage, there will be ample opportunity for her to put the Devil back in Hell.

I don’t know if this story would make for great television, but it’s one of the stories that Boccaccio tells, and Netflix’s show doesn’t tell it, whether because it’s too dirty or because the creatives don’t know how to make something odd and episodic, I don’t know. The Decameron, which premiered on July 25, is instead your standard Medieval romp, with lords and ladies and their servants all hunkering down in a castle to hide from the Plague that ravages the cities and countryside around them, every one of them behaving badly.

The cast ranges from the shrewish betrothed of the castle’s lord (Zosia Mamet), who’s never met the man, to the conniving doctor (Amar Chadha-Patel) of a hypochondriac lord (Douggie McMeekin) who can tell you all there is to know about Alexander the Great’s wars, to a servant (Tanya Reynolds) who arrives disguised as her mistress after having pushed her into the river in a pique. The gates are barred. Filthy pigs roam the grounds. The staff, much diminished, have dumped the lord himself, all swollen and blistered from the ravages of the Black Death, into the moat.

It’s not a bad setup, but we’ve seen the like before: “Bring out your dead!” and all that. The cast are game, with Reynolds, as the class-jumping imposter, anchoring it all with her veering from impetuousness to self-doubt in one turn of an eyebrow. They go about their business, concealing a death here, lightly poisoning someone there, dabbling in a little sodomy for good measure. It putters along to no great purpose.

But in the third episode, the show makes a gesture toward Boccaccio, and his book they say they’ve based it on: now lady of the house (through various machinations) Mamet’s character proposes a game in which each of them will tell a tale (all “on the theme of purity,” as our faux ladyship decrees), and whoever tells one best will become king or queen of the day. The unremittent bickering of her fellows overwhelms that notion, and they give it up.

That cast-off scene is as close as the show comes to Boccaccio, with his seven men and three women (the ratio is off–the show has five of each) hiding out in a countryside villa, away from the Plague in Florence. In the book, they spend each day telling one another stories, with one of them crowned King or Queen at the day’s start and choosing the theme that their stories must follow. The Decameron doesn’t much tell the story of those narrators: the book is the stories they tell, bawdy and anticlerical and fabulous in turn, or all at once. The show, by contrast, just gives us a crowd of spiteful people behaving badly. There’s no story-telling beyond that momentary scene. There’s mostly soap-opera histrionics, with plenty of close-ups of swollen pustules to drive home the point that people are dying here, even if they’re just unsympathetic idiots.

What’s wrong with the show isn’t just that it’s not really The Decameron. It’s that it tries to be dirty, shoving its attempts at transgression in your face, and ends up being dull. When pious, semi-virginal Neifile first stops short of masturbating at the thought of the ripped body of Dr. Dioneo, and then bares herself to him in a stable, insisting that it’s God’s will that he bed her, it’s just dumb. No Christian woman of her era would conflate the urgings of the flesh with the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

And the scene in which Dioneo rebuffs her, all quivering and eager, has nothing for nastiness on something like the second tale of day seven in the book, in which a wife hides her lover in a barrel when her husband comes home unexpectedly, then tells her husband that someone had come to buy the barrel and was inside it, but thought it wasn’t in great shape; so the lover gets out of the barrel, and while the husband and wife have their heads in the barrel to make sure it’s in condition to sell, the lover shtups her from behind. I guess that was a little too raw for our showrunners. But that’s The Decameron. You can substitute some panting and flesh-baring if you want, but come on. The show, by comparison, is milquetoast.

There are some solid performances here, Reynolds conveying vulnerability and understated rage almost by what she doesn’t do than by what she does. Chadha-Patel is comical in his earnestness, and in his obvious duplicity, with McMeekin his floundering and self-aggrandizing foil. Tony Hale, as the castle’s conspiratorial steward, treads the border of silly and ominous.

They’re all fine, though the show only gives us reason to care about one or two of their characters. But let’s face it: any show that in its first episode sets up the conflict between a Medieval mistress and her serving-maid by playing Depeche Mode’s 1984 tune “Master and Servant” doesn’t have anything to say that Sofia Coppola didn’t say about that queen who got guillotined. Look, 1984 was a long time ago. If you’re going to make a show about even longer ago, about a book from back then, make it about that. Not about your present-day prudity disguised as raciness. Give us the meat, or go back to Hell.