The Decameron

Though The Decameron is consistently unpredictable and full of dramatic twists, the story never feels manufactured or manipulative. It’s also surprisingly human, allowing even the most odious characters to grow and the most upstanding ones to degrade.

The strength of every one of these performances drives home how long it’s been since a series delivered a really stellar comedy ensemble. Not just a solid show, but a group effort marked by a shared and truly strange comedic sensibility. (Like “Clue”!)

There's so much to like in this series, from its lush design to its offbeat, go-for-broke comedy. But its best merit may be its characters, who (for better or worse) feel like people you'd know.

While it may be too theatrical for some tastes, The Decameron gets wittier and darker as it goes along, with death (corpses in carts, suppurating neck boils) never far away.

“The Decameron” is under no illusions about the terrors of death or the frailties and vanities of humanity, but it counterweights that with spirited comedy. As a 14th-century physician might say, its humors are well in balance.

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.

The themes it traffics in — social hierarchy, status anxiety, lust — are evergreen enough to stand on their own. The group assembled at the villa may face external threats from roving bandits, but their escalating hysteria means the seeds of their downfall are sown from within.

Thanks to writer Kathleen Jordan and a talented cast, it’s a hoot. Think of it as The White Lotus meets the Black Death, with really silly medieval headwear instead of luxury swimwear.

The Decameron is spinning a tale that is many centuries removed from the present, but this seemingly raunchy house party comedy has so much more beneath the surface, as raucous, wine-drenched celebration gives way to very real struggle, heartbreak, and, ultimately, something resembling triumph.

In total, The Decameron feels stretched beyond its ability to sustain any momentum, with early events surrounded with too much padding and later events appearing like sudden escalations that needed more time to build. The pieces are all there, in other words, but they don’t always fit together as well as they should. All of this still makes The Decameron one of the more interesting new Netflix series of the last year.

It’s simply My Lady Jane + Love Island + White Lotus. And since it’s so busy trying to accomplish all three of those oeuvres at once—while also attempting to establish a cohesive pandemic narrative—it falls just a little shy of a success in any one category. It’s fun to glut yourself on, but it’s more an indulgence than a satisfying meal, and by the time you reach the end, it’s hard not to wish you (like the characters) had indulged a little less.

Still, for all the (relatively timid) sexual hijinks and all the grossout bouts of illness and all the violence and death, “The Decameron” never seems particularly edgy or outrageous.

Netflix’s Decameron stays with 10 core characters—give or take a few peasants and mercenaries—throughout its eight-episode run. This ends up becoming a liability, as the series assumes that if we spend enough time with these rotten people, we’ll grow to love them. The assumption is incorrect. .... Some redemption arcs are more unearned than others, but only Mamet’s Pampinea has the guts to remain reprehensible until the end. Mamet and Hale also stand out for their ability to embody ridiculous characters without turning them into cartoons.

We’re giving The Decameron a lukewarm recommendation because there are characters that we do want to follow in this dark comedy, and we have confidence that the storytelling will help deepen the characters we don’t love. But the comedic elements don’t hit most of the time, and we wonder how much effort it will take viewers to really buy into the goings on at this Tuscan villa.

The Decameron isn't a bad show. It's just… fine. And with so much else now on offer, that's simply no longer good enough.

The Decameron‘s true darkness, when it arrives, is persuasive enough to make you wish the series had been striking that balance better the entire time. Instead, it makes the same mistake its heroes and villains do. It allows itself to pretend nothing matters, until it’s almost too late.

The Decameron falls between too many stools to be a triumph. But it is full of nice performances and lovely gowns (jewel-toned medieval drapery always beats 18th-century pastel puffery for me) and is good enough to mark out a place for itself even in the middle of the current glut of similar offerings.

There are spurts of entertainment to be found, and the game cast tries their damnedest to marry the scene-to-scene mood swings. (Reynolds would be my MVP, with Hale and Jackson as co-runners-up.) Time, however, is not on their side. The 60-minute episodes feel like two (or more) half-hour scripts cobbled together.

The weirdness is welcome, the concept has merit, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

It’s all too tame to function as a rowdy sex comedy or serve as a satirical send up of the upper classes and their orgiastic excesses. Even after the characters start banging across their strict 14th-century class divides, it doesn’t seem to have much of substance to say.

The series lacks nuance, its point of view is about as sharp as a daytime soap opera, and for the life of me I don’t know how these scripts made it into production. This is perhaps the worst series to hit the airwaves since HBO’s “The Time-Traveler’s Wife,” a feat I did not even think possible.