For those of you obsessed with Bridgerton and frustrated at the long wait you’ll now have to endure before the arrival of Season 4, I suspect that a new historical Netflix dramedy arriving next week — with a story that’s built around a wine-soaked sex romp among Italian nobles — will fill the Regency-sized hole in your heart. That soapy new series, The Decameron, is set in 1348, when the Black Plague raging in Florence motivates the nobility to decamp to a lavish hideaway along with their servants.
Like Bridgerton, this medieval black comedy (which hits the streamer on July 25) is a period piece about the upper class and their many kinks and foibles. Sex and debauchery abound. “Think, like, Love Island, but back in the day,” Jessica Plummer, who plays the noblewoman Filomena, told Netflix’s Tudum site. “A lot of drama, a lot of sex, a lot of, yeah, craziness.”
The cast includes Saoirse-Monica Jackson (from Derry Girls) playing a servant girl here, as well as Zosia Mamet (Girls) playing a noblewoman and Tony Hale (Veep) as the steward of the villa. The Decameron creator Kathleen Jordan says she was partly inspired by a collection of stories — Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron — published in Italy in the mid-14th century and which tell the story of a group of nobles and servants who take shelter from the plague in the grand Villa Santa outside Florence.
To pass the time, they take turns telling each other witty and explicit stories (“short little horny tales,” as Jordan describes them).
The Netflix series follows that same premise, but throws in a twist right out of Lord of the Flies: The longer the group stays there, hiding from the plague, order and social norms start to break down. So much so that the orgy of wealth and liquor collapses into a fight for survival.
During a time of crisis, Jordan said in an interview with Netflix, “the chasm between the haves and the have-nots grows wider and wider. Obviously, that’s something we’ve seen in the last few years, in particular with COVID.”
In other words, get ready to experience quarantine (vicariously) all over again if you decide to take the plunge and check out this new eight-episode series. For some historical context about The Decameron, by the way, it’s worth noting that the Black Plague killed some 25-30 million people and ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Among the changes it brought about, it accelerated a revamping of the social order and contributed to the end of feudalism, as well as significantly disrupting the influence of the church.
