It’s a tricky thing to use the foundations of something familiar to build something unexpected.
Without sounding too grand, the history of human storytelling is based on repeating familiar structures, alluding to well-known myths and fables as a way to make the outlandish make sense. Netflix’s new Greek mythology-tinged drama KAOS bases its wide-ranging story in legends most of its audience likely already knows, but don’t expect a straight retelling. The world of KAOS is one where the gods are real and myths play out in real time, and not in the way you think.
The show is set entirely within a modern-day alternate version of Greece, where the ancient pantheon of gods hold sway over the real world in a way similar to The Boys’ depiction of superheroes: Zeus, Hera, and the rest are pop-culture icons as well as very real beings who feed off of human worship; sacrifice is commonplace; and everyone is born with a vaguely worded prophecy foretelling their fate. It cunningly weaves ancient mythology into the plot, taking the familiar legends of Ariadne and the Minotaur, Orpheus and Eurydice, the Trojan War, and the doomed thief Prometheus and turning them inside out, combining them all into a complex story about fate and free will whose every episode is full of surprises.
Stephen Dillane plays omniscient narrator Prometheus, chained to his rock and tortured by his liver-eating eagle, and nonetheless poised to set in motion a series of events that will shake the foundations of Mount Olympus. Atop that great mountain, Zeus (a terrifyingly charming Jeff Goldblum) struts around in velour tracksuits and wonders if humanity isn’t due for a population-thinning natural disaster or two.
On Earth, Trojan rebels deface a monument erected in the gods’ honor, and Ariadne (Leila Farzad), the daughter of Krete’s President Minos (Stanley Townsend), is forced to sort out the mess. Local pop superstar Orpheus (Killian Scott) is touring a new album, and his girlfriend and muse Riddy (Aurora Perrineau) is thinking about leaving him.
Zeus’ hedonist son Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan in an endless supply of garishly patterned shirts) is bored with constant partying and wants to prove himself worthy of his powerful lineage. One sudden disaster (if you’re acquainted with your Greek tragedies, you can guess which) will give him the opening he needs to help a human defy the boundary between life and death, with ramifications far beyond what any human or god can predict.
I won’t spoil the best parts of the show, so that description, while long, barely scratches the surface of how KAOS operates. Creator Charlie Covell, whose equally daring previous Netflix project The End of the F***ing World follows a young aspiring murderer and the would-be victim he falls in love with, has clearly dedicated a lot of thought to how stories so old they’ve become cliché can be led in other directions, creating a world where the familiar takes on new and distinct shapes.
Mythology retellings are all the rage right now, especially Greek ones (Percy Jackson, Lore Olympus, The Song of Achilles, etc.), and the way that KAOS allows its characters to follow fresh directions within their ascribed mythological framework nods toward the show’s structure: subverting audience expectations while treading usual ground. You know the stories, but you don’t know how they’ll go this time.
Jeff Goldblum as Zeus
Justin Downing/NetflixThe show also lives up to the promise of its incredible cast, which feels like a relief considering all the other streaming series that waste their actors’ talents. David Thewlis as a crotchety Hades! Janet McTeer as steely spurned wife Hera! Eddie Izzard as one of the Fates! Billie Piper as Cassandra, the prophet no one ever listens to! One of the best threads follows a young man named Caneus played by Misia Butler, whose role I won’t reveal except to say that it handily reframes modern perceptions of a certain group of gender-segregated people from Greek myth in a way that feels satisfying.
It’s also very funny, but there is a darkness to the humor that sets KAOS apart from Netflix’s more obnoxiously funny comedy-adventures (a third of the characters in this one are dead in the Underworld by the midpoint of the show). There is time set aside for levity between scenes of characters wrestling with the inevitability (or not?) of death in a world ruled by prophecies that are just nebulous enough for their outcomes to be unpredictable.
KAOS winks at you while you watch it, introducing things you think you know before snatching the rug out from under your feet, just as its characters are repeatedly shown how knowing your fate doesn’t necessarily show you the future. It’s an addictive type of storytelling, and KAOS is a pomegranate well worth trying.
