Created by Charlie Covell, the writer behind The End of the F***ing World, Kaos is a contemporary reimagining of Greek mythology, wherein Goldblum is spectacular as the paranoid king of the gods who wanders the grounds of Mount Olympus – think Palace of Versailles meets Florida country club – fretting about a new wrinkle on his forehead and driving the other gods to distraction with his mercurial moods and cloying insecurity (“Am I likeable? Do people like me?” he begs in episode one).
Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) and lovelorn Orpheus (Killian Scott) are the beating heart of Kaos. (Photo: Netflix)[Missing Credit]
The story is narrated by a fourth wall-breaking Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), who is almost always chained to the face of a rock, condemned to an eternity of having his liver picked at by an eagle, except for when he is summoned by Zeus for advice which the king of the gods rarely heeds.
From his ivory tower above the clouds, Zeus watches the escapades of the mortals in Olympia through a TV screen and witnesses the desecration of a shrine to the gods by a group of Trojan teens, setting off a long-awaited prophecy and the unraveling of Zeus’s already-tenuous sanity.
In the city of Heraklion, the mortal side of the story is set afoot when Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau)– who goes by Riddy, because she’s a modern woman – dies on the day she planned to leave her popstar husband, Orpheus (Killian Scott).
I was delighted to see a reimagining of the lovers’ myth that centres Eurydice not as the powerless muse who is only called into existence as the object of Orpheus’s abounding love, but as a woman on the brink of leaving a man who has ceased to see her as a dynamic person. As in the original myth, Riddy travels to the underworld, here depicted as a black-and-white, bureaucratic limbo land. We know Orpheus is going to attempt to follow her there and bring her back, but the beauty of Kaos is that we have no idea how this will happen.
And when Riddy meets the sweet-faced Caeneus, movingly portrayed by Misia Butler, the real heart of the story – and its wonderful unpredictability – is revealed.
Misia Butler plays Caeneus in the Underworld of Olympus in Kaos. (Photo: Netflix)Justin Downing/Netflix
The gods and mortals alike are led by a talented cast of actors, including Nabhaan Rizwan as Zeus’s debaucherous, half-human son Dionysus, who is a perpetual disappointment to his father despite – or perhaps because? – being the most soft-hearted god on Mount Olympus. Janet McTeer is Zeus's deliciously cold and calculated wife (and sister) Hera, David Thewlis is a beleaguered Hades, and Debbie Mazar makes a brief appearance as a sharp-talking Medusa leading a team of civil servants in the underworld. But perhaps the most subtly spellbinding was Suzy Eddie Izzard as one of the Fates – a gender fluid trio of all-knowing prophecy-makers.
The Fates - played by Sam Buttery, Suzy Eddie Izzard, and Ché - are one of the best parts of Kaos. (Photo: Netflix)Justin Downing/Netflix
Switching between storylines – from the gods on Mount Olympus to the Underworld to Poseidon at sea to President Minos in the highest office of Krete – keeps the pace quick and allows the characters’ stories room to breathe.
My only real gripe is that all the actors approach their roles with their natural accents, which is fine if you’re already accepting a certain level of divergence from the Greek myths and a suspension of disbelief, but it always throws me off as a viewer. In what kind of Greek universe – even a mythical one – do half the people sound Irish, some American, some English, but none actually sound Greek?
But with such a banging soundtrack and such originality, it’s easy to become immersed in the world of Kaos. The show’s goofy campness is balanced by moments of profundity, wherein the lavish and laughable exploits of the gods belie the deeper wisdoms encoded in those ancient myths.
The series ends with a great set-up for a second season, so let’s pray to the fickle Netflix gods it gets picked up.
