Despite Its Colorful Reimagining, Kaos Has Frustratingly Little to Say About the Mythology Its Adapting

It’s not his fault, but Rick Riordan ruined Greek mythology modernizations for the rest of us, the same way that J.K. Rowling (as much as I may dislike her) ruined the concept of wizarding schools. Their stories have become so ubiquitous with their central conceits that any new takes on those genres need to be almost impossibly unique. I love Greek mythology as much as the next girl who spent second grade wholeheartedly believing she was the daughter of Athena and her parents were merely adopted ones, but at this point, in 2024, reframing the classic tales enough for them to feel genuinely fresh is a tall order. It’s for that reason I’ve long believed the key to making a good mythological modernization is, in a word, uniqueness.

For better or for worse, Kaos has changed my mind.

Netflix’s latest entry into the genre is undoubtedly unique in its retellings (or, really, rewritings) of its source material. But, as it turns out, perhaps that is not enough for a work of mythology media to be wholly successful. As such, I’ve modified my criteria: uniqueness is still important, but more than anything else, what a story like Kaos needs is purpose—specifically, purpose for its use of Greek myth. It has to be unique enough to stand apart from its predecessors, but intentional enough with its deployment of mythology to convince us that the narrative could not be told without it; it needs to do something new with myth, say something new about it. It’s inarguable that The End of the F—ing World creator Charlie Covell shakes up the old tropes with ease, and while that feels exciting at the series’ start, the longer it goes on, the harder it gets to justify why.

The series’ overarching storyline is not particularly fresh, with or without the involvement of Greek mythology: three unlikely heroes come together to rise up against the (gasp!) corrupt powers that be who, unbeknownst to most civilians, are lying to and exploiting the blissfully ignorant populace for their own gain. Once the three aforementioned heroes are introduced, the show gets very plot-heavy, leaning less and less on humor and wit—and mythology, for that matter—and relying instead on Big Twists. It’s still a fun watch, sure; it’s just not a particularly satisfying one (especially given its conclusion, or, really, its lack thereof). 

That’s not to say that Kaos doesn’t do anything interesting with its source material; it often does, but more in its parts than the sum of them. Some of its modernizations are genuinely inspired and shed new light on old stories. There’s the reinterpretation of the myth of Caeneus (played by the effortlessly likable Misia Butler, a sincere standout even within the starry cast) as a trans man cast away from his home with the Amazons after showing signs of wanting to transition; the reframing of the beloved doomed love story of Orpheus (Killian Scott) and Eurydice (or, as Kaos dubs her, “Riddy,” whom Aurora Perrineau plays with unflagging steeliness) that gives Eurydice rare agency, forcing us to rethink the star-crossed codependency that fueled even hits like Hadestown. The Underworld is not pits of lava bubbling to the tune of demon screeches, but gray-scaled managerial monotony more brutalist than brutality. And while I may not agree with the overhaul Kaos gives to the infamous dynamic between Persephone (Rakie Ayola) and Hades (David Thewlis), I absolutely respect the intent behind it and the attempt to make us question the canonization of myth (a complication I deeply wish Kaos more frequently made good on). 

Aside from some clever reinterpretations of individual myths, though, the grander picture of Kaos feels unmoored from its central conceit. Of course themes about the corruptive force of absolute power are relevant to Greek mythology—but that’s because they’re relevant to literally everything. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like if the story you want to tell 1) revolves around a singular, all-powerful ruler who is 2) provocatively reframed as callous, flippant, and vain that 3) rules over a society whose central belief is in reincarnation… Maybe don’t use a mythology that is famously 1) polytheistic, wherein all the gods—including their leader—are 2) already known to be and often portrayed as callous, flippant, and vain towards the 3) society they rule over, which emphasizes the permanence of the afterlife and one’s inability to come back from it (in other words, a society that is about as far from centered around reincarnation as you can get). I’m not a “mythology purist,” and none of this is about “respecting the sanctity of the classics” or anything of the sort. I am, seriously, all for changing up source material in order to say something new about the thing that you’re pulling from. But Kaos never really says anything new about Greek mythology: it either takes interpretations that, at least in 2024, are relatively widespread then presents them like they’re revolutionary (see: Zeus and the Pantheon are selfish and even cruel, caring far more about themselves than the people down below) or rewrites the old stories so entirely that the new version is too removed from its source to have anything to say about it (see: everything that has to do with “Renewal”).

It’s odd; Kaos evidently loves the material it’s taken from, and knows it well. Everything from the dialogue to the production design is ripe with Easter eggs for eagle-eyed Hellenists: the gas station is called Tyndareus Gasoline, a certain fateful truck has “Serpent Solutions” plastered on the side (you’ll get it when you see it), a grocery’s store cereal aisle is filled with brands like Gaea’s Granola and Spartan Crunch. Covell themselves has said many times that these myths were the seed of the narrative that grew into Kaos—in other words, it’s impossible that the mythology was instead a late addition to the show, the use of Greek myth a last-minute set dressing draped over a pre-existing story for the cultural cache. I don’t mean to sound harsh; it doesn’t really feel like Greek mythology is only ancillary to the story or the world Covell has thought up. Again, there is real care taken to pay homage. But as I delved further and further into the season’s eight episodes (which was somehow both overlong and not quite long enough), I found it hard to shake the feeling that the narrative the series wanted to tell was being held back by the bounds of Greek myth, rather than propelled by it. 

Kaos’ gods are fun to watch the same way as the rich people in White Lotus or The Menu are fun, although in this case, their antics do grow a little stale by the time you reach the eight hour mark. The gods have few plot beats to work with as the scheme against them secretly and slowly comes together, so it ends up feeling like a lot of the same. Jeff Goldblum’s Zeus is dryly flamboyant and casually cruel, fun in that typical Jeff Goldblum way (and his bedazzled tracksuits are to die for), but despite having such a central role, the characterization of Zeus never really ventures beyond the traits even a first impression could glean. He wants to retain his power at all costs and is driven mad with paranoia at the thought of losing it; yeah, him and every other dictator. Janet McTeer’s Hera is utterly Shakespearian, which is lovely, but she, too, rarely deviates from expectation, simply growing increasingly frustrated with her husband for the length of the season. There’s the constantly weary Hades and his determined (yet oddly secretarial feeling) wife Persephones, both of whom play smaller roles than their godly peers. Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) spends most of his time either yacht-side or yearning, although the man does rock a pair of board shorts, and Nabhaan Rizwan’s eager, sympathetic Dionysus has a lot of potential, but as the show progresses and the ensemble widens ever more, the promise his character initially held begins to dwindle. 

Dionysus also has very little to do with Dionysus himself, save for some hedonistic pleasure-seeking in the first episode or two; take out those few minutes, and the character could just as easily be Hermes or Apollo, both of whom would perhaps fit his plotline better (unless, however, the series is inexplicably going off of Orphism instead of mainstream Greek myth—which, actually, would explain a lot: the otherwise baffling connection between Orpheus and Dionysus, the otherwise baffling obsession with reincarnation… But if the series is rooted in Orphism, which was a religious cult created as a desperate attempt to reckon with Ancient Greece’s mainstream perception of death as permanent and meaningless, why doesn’t the series do more with that, why doesn’t it confront the fascinating questions around mythmaking, meaning, and purpose inherent in a tale about Orphism? Why doesn’t it do more to complicate myth by looking at it not only as lies forced on us by a higher power but lies that we humans willingly cling to because we need to believe our lives—our deaths—have purpose? …But I digress.)

The ever-expanding cast does the series few favors, relegating the various unmentioned gods (read: most of them) to a type of background purgatory while Earth-bound players—and cliff-bound, in the case of fourth-wall-breaking narrator Prometheus (Stephen Dillane)—take up precedence. While the tales of our central three prophesied humans Caeneus, Riddy, and the daughter of King Minos, Ariadne (The Decameron’s Leila Farzad), are compelling, Kaos begins to feel like it’s spinning its wheels, especially in the season’s latter half. There is so much plot to go around, and yet it hardly feels like it’s progressing at all; depth is waylaid in favor of breadth, and instead of diving deep into long-running concepts, narratives, or themes, it feels like every episode introduces a new plotline, a new idea, a new twist. Kaos’ world is a large one to start, and it only gets bigger from there: between Earth, the black-and-white Underworld, and the lush mansions of Olympus, there end up being a great many arcs to keep track of, made even more confusing by the show’s reliance on unfamiliar, dystopian-sounding terminology (there are a lot of lines like “The Nothing was never meant to take that many, that’s why The Frame glitched!”). As Kaos’ lens widens, so too does its focus: it loses track, perhaps, of what it’s supposed to be, what it’s trying to do. Or maybe it doesn’t—maybe I just do.

If I’m being fully honest, the plot of the show and the world it’s set within feels like it has more in common with a Divergent-style YA narrative (the kind about rebelling against a dystopian system that the rest of the world blindly follows—you know the type) than what Kaos is actually meant to be: a modernized version of the mythological Ancient Greece of yore. Case in point: the foundational belief of Kaos’ society is “Renewal,” the show’s invented term for reincarnation. (Kaos is, again, overflowing with original ominous-sounding terminology: in addition to Renewal, there’s The Nothing, The Frame, Meander Water, and so on. Meander Water is particularly frustrating, though; it’s the chosen sustenance of the gods in Kaos’ world, so why not just call it Ambrosia or Nectar, parallel terms that already exist in Greek lore?!) It would be one thing if Renewal was an auxiliary addition to Kaos’ civilization, a piece of world-building meant to establish the uniqueness of Covell’s interpretation of Greek myth. It’s another entirely to make it the lynchpin of the entire series, the foundation of its biggest twists and its most emphatic messages. There are so many belief systems centered around reincarnation, around living one’s life for the purpose of achieving a better one in the next cycle rather than living for the sake of living now, so why choose one of the few that has almost nothing to do with it? 

Again: I’m all for a good shake-up. But changes like this one are not subversions of myth, not reinterpretations or reframings that say something new about either the original stories or the act of myth-making itself. If reincarnation was central to the mythology Kaos is grounded in, then the series dramatically pulling away the curtain from it would be impactful, intentional, clever; the narrative would find new meaning in classic myth, and the classic myth would add resonance to the narrative. But instead, at least in this case, the show’s central conceit—a modernization of Greek myth—does end up feeling ancillary to the story it wants to tell. It’s not only less impactful when it comes to messaging and thematic continuity, it also just makes the twists fall deeply flat. I mean, if you’re trying to pull the rug out from under somebody, you should place them in a room with a rug already in it, right? You don’t come into their living room and put a rug (that clashes with the pre-existing decor, no less) down in plain view then force them to stand on it, winking at them all the while. 

What’s frustrating about Kaos is that it has so much potential to be good, but the longer it goes on, the more you realize the series doesn’t quite know how to realize it. Its themes are either too obvious or too muddled to make heads or tails of. In the former case, there’s the self-evident criticism of the gods. They are clearly meant to be seen as analogous to billionaires, to the deified figures that can change the course of a million lives with little more than a press of a key, for little reason beyond their own flippant whims—but, frankly, that’s not all that original of an interpretation anymore. (If, I don’t know, the Christian God or Jesus Christ or the like were presented in this light, now that would be provocative. But, especially in the modern day, hubris has become somewhat of a calling card for the Greek gods, as has having sex with anything with legs, consequences be damned.)

Its messaging is not particularly subtle either (and gets less so as it goes on, due to certain twists): those in power hide behind the narratives of idolatry that they don like armor and wield like weapons precisely because they are terrified we lowly 99% will learn that they are human—and thus, vulnerable—just like the rest of us. The show lays it out very plainly in a classic villain monologue from Zeus in the season’s final episode: “Love, human love… is weakness. We’re gods! We don’t bleed, we don’t die and we don’t love anything lesser than ourselves.” It then lays it out even plainer, as if to ensure viewers don’t mistake that tirade for an endorsement of Zeus’ Machiavellian mindset: a mere five minutes later, we get Persephone clarifying that love “is not a weakness. It’s the opposite” to newcomer-to-empathy Dionysus, just for good measure. There are a lot of moments like this.

In the latter case, however, we have the show’s confusing relationship with fate and the notion of free will. Whole episodes are spent hammering in the fact that no one, not even the gods, can escape their fate; as the Fates put it, “Fate can’t be destroyed.” Fair—except for the fact that literal minutes later, they’re telling the same person that “what you do with [freedom] is up to you.” So… do the actors in this tale have agency or not? Can you decide your own path, or is it set for you? Not even the series seems to know. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if Kaos was actually aiming for that kind of existential uncertainty, I feel like the series would have needed to complicate the issue by asking why the answer even matters in the first place—and, more generally speaking, its morality would need to be a lot more complex than what it is now. 

Love as humanity’s secret weapon is hardly a new idea, and Kaos’ attempts to showcase the promise and peril of love are varied in their degrees of success. Perhaps it’s fitting that while the godly love triangle that snakes its way onto Olympus fails to fully compel, the bond that grows between Riddy and Caeneus is a genuinely sweet one, and watching Riddy fall out of love with Orpheus feels so very human and real. But then there’s also Ari, with her own stories of love and loss, all of which feel perpetually disconnected from the rest of the series. Because, while the marketing promises a story about three lives that collide unexpectedly as they begin to discover their true cosmic purpose, that is not quite apt. Two lives collide. The third remains entirely separate until the final five minutes—and right before that long-awaited collision, the season promptly ends. Kaos’ final act is not a true cliffhanger, but a refusal to finish climbing the cliff itself, and the frustration of its confused mythological adaptation and poor pacing hinders a climax that pulls the plug mid-moment.  

I kept waiting for Kaos to upend its own apparent moral standards the way it upends myth, but perhaps that, too, is just… relegated to Season 2. Still, the obvious question just feels, well,  obvious: what makes Prometheus and the Fates so much better than Zeus and the Pantheon? The protagonists revolt against the gods presumably because they are tired of living as marionettes whose strings are pulled by the whims of a self-interested “higher power,” tired of having their lives ruined for the sake of a “god’s” vision. The message seems to be one of catharsis and victory, of “I defy the gods, I decide my own fate!” Except that can’t be the message, because the protagonists’ revolution is not their idea. The movement of their limbs has never been their own. Their entire lives have been molded—and often in very tragic, traumatizing ways—to ensure that they successfully follow a path Prometheus set them down long before they were even born. Why? Because of Prometheus’ own desire to remove Zeus from power (which would, of course, free Prometheus himself in the process).

The implications are myriad, the open-ended questions endless: is a benevolent puppet master all that different from a cruel one, when both string you up and make you dance at their whim? Can the puppets ever truly make their own stories, or will they forever be at the mercy of those seeking to write their own? It could even get meta with it: what does it mean to be complicit, as writers or as viewers, in the act of myth-making inherent in the telling of stories like this one? Are the actions taken by Prometheus and Zeus really that different from the authorial command the makers of myth levy over the subjects languishing in worlds of the makers’ own creation? What is storytelling if not puppeteers and marionettes all the way down?

That’s the worst part: Kaos sets the stage for so many interesting questions. It just… doesn’t ask them. Or rather, it takes so long figuring out the proper phrasing that by the time it gets around to lilting its voice up in the tell-tale way that signifies a question is finally being asked, the show is already over. The credits are already rolling. Maybe Kaos does have interesting things to say about the mythology it’s pulling from. It just doesn’t deign to enlighten us as to what those might be, instead choosing to withhold its own purpose for the sake of encouraging viewers to return for the next season. Maybe the marketing bid will work, maybe it won’t (and considering how many series are unceremoniously canceled these days, I wouldn’t bet much money either way). Maybe Kaos’ second season will finally make good on the series’ potential. Who can say? All I do know is that, for now, Kaos has a long way to go. 

Casey Epstein-Gross is a New York based writer and critic whose work can be read in Paste, Observer, The A.V. Club, Jezebel, and other publications. She can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television, film, music, politics, or any one of her strongly held opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].

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