How ‘The Decameron’ Showrunner Kathleen Jordan Found the Right Tone for the Plague-Set Comedy

“I was inspired by the concept of examining the slice of life moment of a pandemic,” The Decameron showrunner Kathleen Jordan says to The Hollywood Reporter about the inspiration behind the new Netflix show.

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The dark comedy, which released on the streaming platform last week, is loosely based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s short story collection set during the Black Death. The Decameron finds a group of characters, both nobles and servants, making their way to a villa in the Italian countryside in an attempt to wait out the plague.

While a plague-set show isn’t typically a touted as a “wine-soaked sex romp,” as The Decameron is, the Zosia Mamet and Tony Hale-led show manages to land laughs during a bleak time period.

“I wish that I could say there was a lot of intentionality behind it, but I think if you were to ask me to write a space drama, or I don’t know, a baseball movie or something, it would probably also sound like this,” Jordan explains. The “this” Jordan refers to — the show’s unique tone — is dark comedy that manages to bring out deep sadness and deep laughs within scenes of one another.

Jordan says she was inspired by what the world experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic to tell this story to a modern audience. “I feel like the elevator pitch for the book, The Decameron , is that a bunch of wealthy people abscond to a villa to escape a pandemic, and they tell each other’s stories and everything is fine,” she says.

“Through a political lens, and through having witnessed and experienced what we did in 2020, my feeling is no, everything isn’t fine,” Jordan continues, noting that “the skeleton of that” is what she wanted to set in place for the show.

“I like to leave space for sort of the awkward and strange interactions that I think we all have in our day-to-day lives,” Jordan says of her writing. She alludes that there’s likely similarities between tone of historical times and modern day.

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“I think obviously there’s a sort of a history of stuffiness when we try to set things in history,” she shes. “And, while I obviously don’t think they have the cadence that we have, or sound like Zosia Mamet, in 14th century Italy; I believe that it is very likely that there was more sort of…”

“Quirk,” the show’s star Hale, Jordan’s partner for show press, adds, to which she agrees.

“Yeah, strangeness in the margins,” she finishes, making a point to say she wanted the show to be “slightly removed from reality” while also feeling honest to her.

Jordan says she hopes the “soapiness” of The Decameron comes through and feels “poppy and bingeable” to a modern audience, managing to relate it back to the Boccaccio’s original intention with the story.

“Boccaccio, in the forward to the text, talks about how men are out there hunting, and doing their man things and women are staying at home just thinking about love, and they don’t really have anything to do. So, he wrote this book for them,” Jordan says. “It’s like he’s basically saying, ‘Here’s your beach read, girls.'”

The Decameron is now streaming on Netflix.

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