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It’s arduous to be a god. At the least, that’s what Kaos would have you ever imagine. The brand new eight-episode Netflix sequence (pronounced “chaos”) seeks to deliver the heavens crashing all the way down to Earth, re-situating the gods of Greco-Roman mythology inside a contemporary context. Together with Prime Video’s Good Omens, the present could possibly be stated to fall into the fledgling microgenre of “mythological comedy”. Not the obvious cocktail for laughs, maybe – however within the palms of Charlie Covell (The Finish of the F***ing World), who is aware of?
On the centre of Kaos’s universe is Zeus, King of the Gods, who reigns over trendy Crete from a form of antiseptic, spa-like sky palace. Shelling out with the standard depictions of the determine as a burly, bearded electro-hunk, Kaos’s Zeus is useless, squirrelly, and performed by Jeff Goldblum – right here iterating winningly on the type of louche playboy archetype he has lengthy made his speciality. Discovering a wrinkle on his brow one morning, Zeus turns into satisfied it’s an indication he’s about to fall sufferer to a reign-toppling prophesy; because of a wry, plummy voiceover from Zeus’s frenemy/prisoner Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), we all know that that is true.
Thus begins Kaos’s sprawling, irreverent story, which mixes, matches and remixes numerous legends into one big, messy tangle. In addition to Zeus, a pantheon of different mythological figures are given a form of modern reinvention: Billie Piper’s Cassandra is a visionary dressed as a frazzled paranoiac, Orpheus (Killian Scott) a Sam Fender-ish pop star, Hades a splendidly creepy David Thewlis. Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), Zeus’s half-human son, is remade right here as a clubbing, substance-abusing nepo-baby — however one beneath the thumb of his dad and stepmum, Hera (a steely Janet McTeer). For Dionysus, it’s a god-eat-god world.
It’s, after all, not simply Netflix who’ve been attending to the Greek. Revisionist retellings of historic Greek myths have been having one thing of a second currently, in all the pieces from video video games (the fiendishly nice Hades) to musical theatre (the Tony-splattered Hadestown). In comparison with these admittedly high-bar examples, Kaos is slightly shaggy and incohesive within the methods it toys with custom. These acquainted with the unique lore will doubtless discover themselves cringing as usually as nodding in recognition; these unfamiliar might discover themselves misplaced within the inflow of mingling characters, all drawn both too broadly or too vaguely.
There’s no denying that elements of Kaos are compelling – tales don’t endure for millennia in the event that they aren’t, basically, outdated yarn. However the sequence strains at factors beneath the load of its arch, high-concept premise. It won’t all be Greek to me – however a few of it positively was.
