Playing like Percy Jackson for grownups, with a dash of American Gods and Hadestown thrown in for good measure, Netflix‘s dark comedy Kaos is packed with big ideas that creator Charlie Covell struggles to explore in any depth.
Over eight hour-long episodes, my response to Kaos and its often clever upending of mythological tropes went from “That’s really cool, I can’t wait to see what they do with that” to “That’s interesting, but I know it won’t go anywhere” to “Meh.” With an impressive cast, a cheeky tone and little investment in substantive follow-through, the show goes from promising to frustrating to disappointing — albeit with tantalizing hints throughout of what could have been.
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Kaos
Jeff Goldblum commands attention throughout as Zeus, the all-powerful yet fiercely neurotic king of the gods and overall facilitator of a humanity that still worships them. Ruling from Mt. Olympus with his sister-wife Hera (Janet McTeer), Zeus obsesses over the sincerity of human sacrifices and a mysterious prophecy that he worries might spell his downfall. In his pettiness and insecurity, he’s ostracized his brothers Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) and Hades (David Thewlis) to the sea and the Underworld, respectively, and sentenced his former best bud Prometheus (Stephen Dillane) to permanent torture. He’s such a pain that the only one of his children who even answers his phone calls is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), a bored club kid who yearns for more respect from dear old dad.
Down on earth, people are going about their business, all certain that they’re just pawns to the gods, the Fates and the Furies. But might they be on the verge of potentially upending the deities and establishing supremacy for free will? Kinda! Maybe! The only thing that’s for sure is that whatever happens, Cassandra (Billie Piper) already tried to warn everybody.
The key to toppling of gods may rest with three mortals. Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), or “Riddy” for short, has begun to fall out of love with hubby Orpheus (Killian Scott) — or at least, she’s weary of being nothing but a muse to a global pop star. Ari (Leila Farzad), or “Ariadne” for long, is the daughter of royalty, but she’s tired of being defined by childhood trauma. Then there’s Caeneus (Misia Butler), working a low-level job in the Underworld and lamenting a family betrayal.
Especially in the first couple of episodes, it’s plain to see what attracted Covell to the idea of a modern society in which the Greek gods seem to be the only religious game in town.
For an hour or two, the world-building is dynamic. Set in Greece (mostly Crete) but filmed somewhere in Spain, everything about Kaos feels just a little askew. I enjoyed trying to figure out the cultural and spiritual ripples that would lead to, for example, the array of cereals in this society, or its clothing and architecture. The series constantly name-checks different beloved figures from the pages of Edith Hamilton or D’Aulaires. The effect is similar, with a more satirical tone, to the way Mike Flanagan blended family melodrama and Poe references in The Fall of the House of Usher.
If you’re a myth-head, you’ll have some fun figuring out when Covell sticks to canon, when they make playful correctives for contemporary audiences and when they just say, “Screw it, let’s stick with the name but throw everything else aside.” The series wants to reflect on myth-making, the tales we rely upon to give our lives purpose and issues of authorship to those stories. I wish it was better at offering that commentary, and that it had its own deeper meaning.
Unfortunately, the series becomes an almost nonstop stream of neat bits and pieces, fused by an over-aggressive soundtrack and intrusive Promethean voiceover instead of by an actual narrative. The “plot” increasingly becomes bickering deities intercut with Riddy’s journey to the Underworld intercut with whatever Ari is doing, with no real momentum to speak of. It builds to an ending that finally felt like it put the chaos into Kaos, except that I no longer cared anymore.
It’s the exception rather than the rule when a good idea is followed up on any level. So the provocative detail of a trans man brought up by the Amazons getting a second mention almost counts as substantive, even if I suspect it should be the premise of a TV series all its own and not a footnote in this one. More frequently, the best concepts get ignored or undermined by hasty retreats. Like how the black-and-white bureaucratic vision of the Underworld goes from monochromatic to monotonous, building to a weakly conceived “twist” that somehow has less heft than the similar twist in … Sausage Party.
Ideally, stories like this open up their worlds as they go along. But the world of Kaos becomes smaller and less rich — much too adult for young viewers, not really mature enough for grownups.
Since the plot runs out of fun, the series’ amusement flows from the performances by the exceptional cast.
Every Goldblum line-reading is a small treasure. Especially in the current political climate, there’s something very funny about an interpretation in which a lifetime of omnipotence and insularity have left Zeus as a tyrant who’s at least as weird as he is evil. None of the supporting players feel, necessarily, like they’re in the same show or even in the same five or six shows — Goldblum’s doing Wes Anderson, McTeer’s doing Shakespeare and Curtis is working on his tan on a yacht.
In isolation, though, it’s easy to appreciate McTeer’s regal bearing and vicious scheming, Rizwan’s debauched joy with the mortal world and Thewlis’ mournful intellectualizing of the afterlife (he’s paired with Rakie Ayola, whose Persephone marks perhaps the biggest deviation from the classic standard). Butler’s performance was my favorite among the humans, while the cameos from the likes of Piper, Debi Mazar and Suzy Eddie Izzard keep things lively.
Netflix first ordered Kaos back in 2018 — even accepting a global pandemic and multiple industry strikes, that’s a LONG time ago — and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since, in part because Covell’s previous credit at the streamer was the hilariously bleak roadtrip romance The End of the F***ing World. Kaos offers only a dash of comparably crackling dialogue and even less of a cohesive worldview, nihilistic or otherwise.
You can still sense what I assume was an enticing outline that displayed Covell’s enthusiasm and made Netflix want to come on board. But you can also sense the places somebody hoped to come back and replace the generic gap-filling with high drama or comedy, and instead just left the filler.
