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Creator Kathleen Jordan developed the show after reading Boccaccio's original Decameron during the COVID-19 pandemic and recognizing that the medieval text's premise — affluent people retreating to wait out a plague while trading stories — was as immediate as any contemporary drama she could have conceived, requiring only the translation of its social dynamics into television-compatible character work.
The production filmed on location at historic Italian villas, with the main setting constructed from multiple combined properties to create an environment that felt simultaneously grand and claustrophobic — a production design challenge that required coordinating with Italian heritage authorities while giving the show the visual richness that distinguishes it from studio-bound period comedies.
Tony Hale, best known for playing Buster Bluth on Arrested Development and Gary on Veep, has described the role of Sirisco — the villa's terrified, self-interested steward — as one of the most physically demanding of his career, the medieval setting requiring comedic physical performance that drew on theatrical and circus traditions rather than the contemporary naturalistic register he had worked in for most of his television career.
The Decameron is Netflix's wickedly entertaining limited series inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century collection of tales, transposed from Florence to a rural Italian villa where a group of nobles and their servants have gathered to wait out the Black Death in 1348. Created by Kathleen Jordan, the show uses its medieval setting as permission for modern sexual politics, class dynamics, and comic mayhem — the historical frame providing a funhouse mirror rather than a documentary, and every character speaking and thinking in ways that are deliberately and productively anachronistic. The pandemic premise has obvious contemporary resonance, but the show wears it lightly.
Zosia Mamet leads an ensemble that includes Tony Hale, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Tanya Reynolds, and Amar Chadha-Patel in a series that manages to be simultaneously bawdy, politically sharp, and genuinely touching without losing the comic energy that makes its more serious intentions feel earned rather than imposed. The villa and its grounds are rendered with gorgeous production design that makes fourteenth-century Italy feel lush and immediately inhabitable, and Jordan's writing finds contemporary emotional truth in situations that are formally absurd — the wealthy hiding from plague while their servants do the dangerous work of maintaining the illusion of safety.
The Decameron premiered in July 2024 to reviews that praised its wit, its ensemble performances, and its refusal to be simply a period comedy or simply a contemporary allegory. Critics noted that Kathleen Jordan had created something rare — a show that is actually funny in the precise, character-derived way that is genuinely difficult to achieve, while also saying something about class, gender, and survival that remained honest rather than preachy. It streams on Netflix and rewards binge-watching in the way that only genuinely comic television can manage.
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