It’s hard to be a god. At least, that’s what Kaos would have you believe. The new eight-episode Netflix series (pronounced “chaos”) seeks to bring the heavens crashing down to Earth, re-situating the gods of Greco-Roman mythology within a modern context.
Along with Prime Video’s Good Omens , the show could be said to fall into the fledgling microgenre of “mythological comedy”. Not the most obvious cocktail for laughs, perhaps – but in the hands of Charlie Covell (The End of the F***ing World ), who knows? At the centre of Kaos ’s universe is Zeus, King of the Gods, who reigns over modern Crete from a kind of antiseptic, spa-like sky palace. Dispensing with the traditional depictions of the figure as a burly, bearded electro-hunk, Kaos ’s Zeus is vain, squirrelly, and played by Jeff Goldblum – here iterating winningly on the sort of louche playboy archetype he has long made his speciality.
Finding a wrinkle on his forehead one morning, Zeus becomes convinced it’s a sign he’s about to fall victim to a reign-toppling prophesy; thanks to a wry, plummy voiceover from Zeus’s frenemy/prisoner Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), we know that this is true. Thus begins Kaos ’s sprawling, irreverent story, which mixes, matches and remixes various legends into one giant, messy tangle. As well as Zeus, a pantheon of other mythological figures are given a kind of contemporary reinvention: Billie Piper’s Cassandra is a visionary dressed as a frazzled paranoiac, Orp.