'The Decameron' is All About 14th Century Black Death Era Teen Angst

After disappearing from the radar for several months, Netflix has released the first look images from its long-awaited foray into 14th-century Italy, The Decameron. Initially greenlit in August 2022, the series is "inspired by" the contemporaneously published short-story collection of the same name by Giovanni Boccaccio, and was billed at the time as "soapy period drama" in the mold of Bridgerton with lots of young people in period costume acting like teenagers do when the hormones kick in and the rule get kicked out. However, since then, most of the announcements for it have been under the "Netflix is a Joke" banner, which suggests the streaming service sees it more as a comedy than a drama.

The first look images definitely suggest that showrunner and series creator Kathleen Jordan (the brilliant mind behind the critically adored and sadly canceled Teenage Bounty Hunters) is leaning into the humor to counter the setting from Boccaccio's original manuscript. Believed to date from ~1350 CE (or thereabouts), The Decameron contains one hundred stories told by ten people (seven women, three men) over ten days as they huddle in a country villa outside the city of Florence, desperately trying to escape the Black Death. Their lives range from servant class to nobly bred, and their stories range from silly to witty to erotic, causing them to be banned by the church for periods of time. However, they survived in part due to being selected by 19th-century scholars as being "culturally important," in that it gives a window into an era that would otherwise have been lost.

Though the series is set in Italy, and filmed in and around Rome, the cast is international, with the series starring two well-known British actors: Saoirse-Monica Jackson (Derry Girls) and Tanya Reynolds (Sex Education).