'Kaos' and the Netflixification of Greek Myths

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 3, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 3, 2024 |

In Kaos, Jeff Goldblum stars as Zeus, the king of the gods, who rules from Olympus over Earth in a present-day setting. He’s charismatic and Goldblum-y until the Trojan Seven desecrate a monument devoted to him in the city of Krete. Earth’s growing lack of respect (and fear) for the gods and a new wrinkle he finds on his forehead needle at Zeus’s insecurities. He’s particularly concerned about a prophecy warning that his reign will end and chaos will ensue.

His efforts to prevent the prophecy from coming true, however, only seem to play into it, and Zeus’s Goldblum-ness slowly evolves into something more akin to a paranoid David Krumholtz. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that his wife/sister, Hera (Janet McTeer, deserving better), is having an affair with Poseidon (Cliff Curtis, trying mostly successfully to make Sea Daddy a thing), and even Hades (David Thewlis) is questioning Zeus’s plan for him in the underworld.

There are also several half-gods and humans who figure into the prophecy. There’s Riddy (or Eurydice, played by Aurora Perrineau), who is offed by a bus on the day she intends to break up with her husband, Orpheus (Killian Scott). Orpheus is thus determined — with the aid of Zeus’s rebellious son, Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) —to storm the underworld and return to Earth with Riddy because nothing says “I love you” like refusing to accept your wife’s decision to leave you, even in death (to be fair, Orpheus doesn’t know his wife no longer loves him). There’s also Caeneus (Misia Butler), for whom Riddy develops feelings in the underworld, and Ari (Leila Farzad), who is betrayed by her father, Minos (Stanley Townsend), the President of Krete. Minos has a cruel secret that may also upend all of Zeus’s planning.

Other gods and demigods play their roles in the prophecy and steal their scenes, most notably Stephen Dillane’s Prometheus, Debi Mazar’s Medusa, and Billie Piper’s Cassandra, a seer who sets it all in motion. They’re so good in their limited roles that it highlights how much better Kaos could’ve been.

Kaos is fun, but not that fun. The series comes from Charlie Covell, and while it’s amusing to see Greek gods in a present-day context as well as the myth remixes, Covell never goes for broke here the way they did in The End of the F***ing World. The first season of The End of the F***ing World felt like a series that succeeded outside of the Netflix algorithm, while Kaos feels constrained by it — it’s a promising concept stripped down, smoothed out, and repackaged for maximum binge-ability and minimum mental effort.

I want to say that Kaos feels like the Netflixification of Neil Gaiman, but my colleagues insist that The Sandman already did that. Even still, Kaos feels more accessible but also less interesting. Even the concept itself only indulges in Greek myths on a surface level — it’s all reference and no reverence, almost as though the myths were used like pop-culture references in a Scream movie, more to flavor the story than to drive it.

That said, the performances are universally good. I happen to like the pop-culture references in Scream movies, and Kaos is a surprisingly easy watch — I spent a day traveling from West Coast to East, and it helped to painlessly pass the time, which is usually the best we can expect from a Netflix show. In that regard, Kaos does not disappoint, except for the fact that it’s another one of those series where the entire first season seems to be building toward the actual story it wants to tell. It would be fine if Netflix reliably renewed their new series (and it didn’t take two years for it to finally return). As it stands, I’d watch a second season to see how it plays out, but despite being left in limbo by its ending, I wouldn’t lose any sleep if Netflix decided to pull the plug.