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Louise Thomas
Editor
It’s hard to be a god. At least, that’s what Kaos would have you believe. The new eight-episode Netflix series (pronounced “chaos”) seeks to bring the heavens crashing down to Earth, re-situating the gods of Greco-Roman mythology within a modern context. Along with Prime Video’s Good Omens, the show could be said to fall into the fledgling microgenre of “mythological comedy”. Not the most obvious cocktail for laughs, perhaps – but in the hands of Charlie Covell (The End of the F***ing World), who knows?
At the centre of Kaos’s universe is Zeus, King of the Gods, who reigns over modern Crete from a kind of antiseptic, spa-like sky palace. Dispensing with the traditional depictions of the figure as a burly, bearded electro-hunk, Kaos’s Zeus is vain, squirrelly, and played by Jeff Goldblum – here iterating winningly on the sort of louche playboy archetype he has long made his speciality. Finding a wrinkle on his forehead one morning, Zeus becomes convinced it’s a sign he’s about to fall victim to a reign-toppling prophesy; thanks to a wry, plummy voiceover from Zeus’s frenemy/prisoner Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), we know that this is true.
Thus begins Kaos’s sprawling, irreverent story, which mixes, matches and remixes various legends into one giant, messy tangle. As well as Zeus, a pantheon of other mythological figures are given a kind of contemporary reinvention: Billie Piper’s Cassandra is a visionary dressed as a frazzled paranoiac, Orpheus (Killian Scott) a Sam Fender-ish pop star, Hades a wonderfully creepy David Thewlis. Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), Zeus’s half-human son, is remade here as a clubbing, substance-abusing nepo-baby — but one under the thumb of his dad and stepmum, Hera (a steely Janet McTeer). For Dionysus, it’s a god-eat-god world.
It is, of course, not just Netflix who have been getting to the Greek. Revisionist retellings of ancient Greek myths have been having something of a moment lately, in everything from video games (the fiendishly great Hades) to musical theatre (the Tony-splattered Hadestown). Compared to these admittedly high-bar examples, Kaos is a little shaggy and incohesive in the ways it toys with tradition. Those familiar with the original lore will likely find themselves cringing as often as nodding in recognition; those unfamiliar may find themselves lost in the influx of mingling characters, all drawn either too broadly or too vaguely.
There’s no denying that parts of Kaos are compelling – stories don’t endure for millennia if they aren’t, fundamentally, a good old yarn. But the series strains at points under the weight of its arch, high-concept premise. It might not all be Greek to me – but some of it definitely was.
