I am sorry to disappoint anyone who, hearing of the new series "Kaos," which Netflix styles as "KAOS," is expecting a "Get Smart" spinoff. We are instead facing the third series currently in production steeped in Greek history and mythology, after Fox's animated "Krapopolis" and Disney+'s excellent "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." (And three, as we say in the news game, makes a trend.
) "Kaos," which premieres Thursday, is set in a modern, metropolitan, alternative "Krete" (played by Spain), ruled from high above by Zeus (Jeff Goldblum), king of the gods, the capo di tutti capi — if a phrase from across the Ionian Sea may be allowed — and locally, with military overtones, by President Minos (Stanley Townsend), a "bozo" in Zeus' opinion. Mt. Olympus is pictured here as a huge white and gold mansion, where Zeus lives with Hera (Janet McTeer), his queen, wife — and sister, a title helpfully adds.
Other characters pop in and out, not always of their own volition, including Zeus' brother Poseidon (Cliff Curtis), who hangs out on a luxury super yacht, and son Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), a bored club kid looking for something more. Depressed other brother Hades (David Thewlis) is stuck overseeing the underworld, a bureaucracy rendered in black and white where the architecture is all undistinguished brutalism. Advertisement In "Kaos," the underworld is rendered in black and white.
Hades, the god of the underworld, is played by David Thewlis. Rakie Ayola stars as Persephone. (Justin Downing / Netflix ) As we begin, Zeus — who looks back wistfully to the days when the family would get together for barbecues — has become obsessed with a newly spotted "vertical wrinkle" on his forehead, which he links to a prophecy predicting the end to the family's power.
(It doesn't help his mood that a monument unveiled on "Olympia Day" proves to have been defaced by blasphemous anti-gods graffiti and a mountain of excrement.) "I'm supposed to be immortal — what is that? Aging?..
. Robert Lloyd.
