An Epic Poem That Doesn’t Feel Very Epic

Jeff Goldblum plays Zeus, king of the gods, in Kaos. In the marketing for the Netflix series, he’s been positioned as more of an Atlas-like figure, with the entire show carried on his back—and his twitchy, stuttering shtick. In actuality, Kaos is distributed pretty evenly among its large cast of characters, many of whom don’t really seem like they belong to the same world, and none of whom prove strong enough to keep the series from crumbling.

Kaos takes place in a world not unlike our present one, except here the Greek gods are real and rule over humanity from atop Mount Olympus. We’re introduced to the major members of this pantheon of gods in an opening sequence set to Dire Straits’s “Money for Nothing,” with each character title often followed by a smaller one offering some glib addendum. This introductory sequence—and the rest of the eight-episode series—is narrated irreverently by Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), who occasionally addresses the camera directly.

From that obvious dad-rock musical choice—along with the likes of Blue Oyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” and the Zombies’s “Time of the Season”—to the show’s winking, Deadpool-ish brand of humor, nothing about the way Kaos begins feels particularly inspired, or particularly inspiring. Were Cassandra here, she’d likely have some ominous things to say.

The series follows Zeus as he becomes increasingly worried about losing power, just as a group of humans on Earth are drawn into a plan to make sure that he does. Caught in between these two realms is Zeus’s son, Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), who gets involved in mortal affairs in a bid to win the respect of his father. Dionysus is arguably Kaos’s true main character, and Rizwan gives an endearing performance, but his Dionysus is defined by a skittish, fast-talking demeanor, which you may not associate with the hedonistic god of wine and revelry.

The most notable among the Earth-bound characters are Orpheus (Killian Scott), imagined here as a Chris Martin-esque stadium pop-rocker, and his partner Eurydice, who prefers to go by “Riddy” (Aurora Perrineau). Fans of Greek mythology will know roughly what to expect from this plotline, which Kaos reduces to an exceptionally drab love triangle in which Riddy falls for a sad-eyed white boy and then gets cast down to the underworld where she falls for another one.

The Greek gods have been re-imagined on screen in countless ways, showing up in everything from Ray Harryhausen epics to Disney cartoons and ultraviolent video games, but Kaos does little to earn a place in that canon. There’s nothing in the way that Zeus and his kin are depicted to separate them from any of the other toxic families on TV, and even their godly powers are rendered in the most uninventive terms: a bit of telekinesis here, a bit of teleporting there.

Zeus does throw one of his patented thunderbolts in a later episode of the series, though even this essentially happens off screen. Between that and the fact that Dionysus is the only child of Zeus who appears in the series, the whole thing recalls that Deadpool 2 joke about 20th Century Fox only being able to afford the appearance of a couple of X-Men in the film.

Despite the fact that no effort is made to style the Olympians in an especially distinctive way, Kaos still suffers from an issue that plagues a lot of streaming-era shows, where every item of clothing looks like a costume. Whatever realm we’re in, everyone’s outfits have that fresh-off-the-rack crispness about them. This is especially glaring when it comes to the Furies, who may be the least gnarled biker gang to ever grace the screen.

More fundamentally, there’s a real uncertainty about the sort of series Kaos wants to be. Cast members like Rizwan and Suzy Eddie Izzard (playing one of the Fates) relish the chance to chew some scenery, while others play their roles with the seriousness of a Greek tragedy. The series doesn’t have a consistent enough internal logic to succeed as a grown-up fantasy series—at least one plot beat hinges on the fact that these nigh-omnipotent deities communicate by landline telephone—but it’s also not funny or outsized enough to function as a comic farce.