By Ellen Gamerman
Covid isn't funny, but do you know what is? The bubonic plague.
The new Netflix limited series "The Decameron" offers a saucy romp through the Black Death. The show, set in 1348 as beautiful nobles and their servants quarantine themselves on the grounds of a rural Italian villa, gave itself the task of finding dark humor in the chaos wrought by a long-ago pandemic.
The eight-episode show is also, of course, a commentary on the pandemic that the world recently experienced. As such, it is one of the first Covid-inspired comedy series to hit a major streaming platform since the outbreak. The series, out this week, was conceived during lockdowns and finds satire in the social rifts caused by the pandemic, when the gulf between the haves and have nots was particularly exposed. (Remember celebrities staying strong from personal basketball courts and lush green lawns?)
"The humor is not derived from making light of suffering--the humor in the show is much more derived from the ridiculousness of social stature and the differences between classes," says series creator Kathleen Jordan. "Rather than leaning out of the darkness, we are leaning into it."
Art about the pandemic has been tricky to execute. Some audiences don't want to revisit a period they'd rather forget. And pandemic-themed projects run the risk of speaking to such a specific moment that they're more like entries in a time capsule than popular entertainment. The pandemic was a formative moment in world history, but when it comes to film and TV about the experience, so far there's not much to see.
A smattering of pandemic-themed screen projects so far include "Staged," a BBC series starting in 2020, where actors David Tennant and Michael Sheen play fictionalized versions of themselves trying to rehearse a play by video call. "The Bubble," a 2022 Netflix comedy movie from Judd Apatow, featured the cast of an action movie stuck together in a fancy hotel to prevent the spread of Covid on set. "Stress Positions," a 2024 film starring comedian John Early, tells the story of a germaphobe who must care for his injured nephew while quarantining in Brooklyn.
Novelists were quick to jump on the subject. Gary Shteyngart's 2021 novel "Our Country Friends" tells the story of a group isolating in upstate New York while the virus attacks in the city. "Violeta," an early 2022 novel by Isabel Allende, follows one woman's life framed by the Spanish flu at the start and Covid at the end. Sigrid Nunez's 2023 novel "The Vulnerables" uses a person pet-sitting a parrot during lockdown as its narrative jumping-off point.
"The Decameron," starring Zosia Mamet and Tony Hale, uses the Black Death as a proxy, delivering its social satire about the 21st-century pandemic by going back nearly 700 years to the Middle Ages. The series bears little resemblance to medieval scribe Giovanni Boccaccio's "The Decameron" beyond its narrative structure and some smaller details.
Mamet, whose knowledge of the Black Death prior to this project was largely limited to a "Monty Python" skit, sees comedy as a balm for post-pandemic stress. "You can take an experience that was so horrifying, " she says, "and when you couch it in something slightly absurdist, it allows people to process what they went through and also laugh at it, hopefully, which I think inevitably is helpful in moving through a traumatic experience."
The opening credits of "The Decameron" use haunting music and weird imagery, a little like HBO's "The White Lotus" except with rats. The first episode features the religious imagery of the Dark Ages alongside weeping sores, gangrene and pallor, punctuated by bloody-mucus-evoking sound effects.
Once the action reaches the countryside, the mood improves. Here, under the threat of death from pestilence, characters show their best and worst selves. An upper-class hypochondriac discovers his hidden capacity for heroism, while a downtrodden servant finds salvation by pretending to be the rich gentlewoman who tormented her.
"We had a guiding philosophy in the writers' room, which was that if you don't change and you don't adapt, you die," says Jordan, whose last project was the 2020 Netflix series "Teenage Bounty Hunters" about Christian high school girls. "That was the biggest virtue you can bring to a situation like the pandemic, the ability to look at and within yourself and decide which parts of yourself you wish to change and which parts you wish to throw away."
"The Decameron" finds humor in the false remedies that pop up during a pandemic, like the 14th-century practice of filling a mask with flowers to guard against infection from plague victims. Here, the servant Licisca interprets such advice by sticking flowers up her nose, their stems dangling from her nostrils as she tries to minister to the ill.
For Tanya Reynolds, who plays Licisca, the set at times felt all too real. "There's a scene where she's in the street and they're pouring a truckload of dead bodies off the bridge into the water," she says. "It really felt like I was in the 1300s in Florence."
The show, whose producers include Jenji Kohan of "Orange Is the New Black" and "Weeds," is the brainchild of Jordan, who had been fascinated by the Black Death since childhood. In fourth grade, when her teacher asked students to explore a subject of their choice, Jordan stood out from her classmates by picking the bubonic plague.
"We hope that for every high in the show and joke you have and silly pratfall or someone stumbling on their words, that there's as much heart, " Jordan says. "There's certainly tragedy. There's love stories and stories about people coming into their identity, and how different they are based on what the context is."
Is now the moment when the pandemic crosses from crisis into content?
"I don't think we'll ever in our lifetimes understand even the reach of the impact of this time," says Jordan. "It's good to start talking about it through art."
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 25, 2024 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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