Charlie Covell’s Kaos is far, far better than its rapid cancellation would suggest
“Gods don’t bleed”
The streaming model is undoubtedly broken. The big-budget, star-casted Kaos premiered on Netflix at the end of August this year; by October, it had been cancelled – had it been airing weekly, it would have only just been halfway through its eight episodes before the axe fell. Netflix undoubtedly have their metrics and terabytes of data to base their decisions on but this doesn’t feel a good way to do business, less still an environment to create and nurture art.
I’m evidently part of the problem, only having gotten round to watching the show now, despite being keen on the look of it. Creator Charlie Covell has transplanted the world of the Greek and Roman gods to the modern day to give us a fresh style of mythology, a bracing look at power, fate, sex, behaviour – both as it concerns the human and the divine and sometimes both together – as first told by the ancients, retold now by contemporaries and just as insightful.
It’s a huge sprawling thing as it folds in aspects of many familiar tales – Orpheus and Eurydice, Medusa, and the Minotaur too – around its central frame of Zeus (Jeff Goldblum in cracking form) having an existential crisis. A powerful prophecy foretelling his doom shows signs of coming true and after aeons of autocratic rule, there are plenty who would help it come to pass, not least his disgruntled wife Hera (an imperious Janet McTeer), his former pal and now prisoner Prometheus (Stephen Dillane) and reckless son the half-human Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan).
Away from Mount Olympus, there’s also three humans down on Krete whose fates are closely intertwined with all this. Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) is dealing with having killed and figuring out life in the Underworld, Caeneus (Misia Butler) is a worker in the Underworld and begins to notice that something is seriously wrong and Ariadne (Leila Farzad) is wrestling with family secrets and looming presidential power.
With trios of Fates and Furies meddling and manipulating from the sidelines and a vein of dark comedy co-existing with a fair bit of tragedy (Gabby Wong and Robert Emms’ grieving parents betrayed by Orpheus are so good), the result is multi-layered complex storytelling that manages that rare feat of satisfying in all aspects. It looks luscious, it rarely confuses and it has such narrative power that you’ll struggle not to binge. But only the one series though, because they cancelled it. Boo.
