High Drama on Mount Olympus: KAOS and the Curse of Eternal Free Time

Netflix’s KAOS opens with Jeff Goldblum staring at a suspiciously zit-like mark on his divine ass. That’s your first clue: this is not your classics professor’s retelling of the Greek myths.

Set in a stylized, mythpunk world where gods eat falafel and humans file complaints about their reincarnation status, KAOS throws together Dionysus in eyeliner, Hera in full ice-queen regalia, and Hades as a bureaucratic burnout. The vibe is equal parts Succession, Hadestown, and a fashion shoot gone off the rails in Mykonos.

To be clear, this is not a faithful retelling. You won’t find Homer or Hesiod smiling down on this one. Most of the original mythos is reduced to name-checking and thematic winks. Zeus is petty, Poseidon is horny, and everyone is sleeping with everyone else while the world crumbles. The show tries to juggle prophecy, pop stardom, intergenerational trauma, and the death-industrial complex—and occasionally drops all of them.

But when it works, it really works.

The music is a banger: Orpheus as a softboi pop star crooning to ABBA and Dire Straits? Yes, please. The Underworld, surprisingly, is the most coherent plane of existence, styled like a Kafkaesque HR department for unresolved souls. Meanwhile, Olympus feels like a Vegas Airbnb booked by a Greek billionaire with delusions of subtlety.

Performances carry the day. Goldblum is delightful, Janet McTeer’s Hera could gut you with a look, and David Thewlis’ Hades makes burnout look almost poetic. There’s also an actual plot in there somewhere—prophecies, chosen mortals, a potential apocalypse—but you’re mostly here for the aesthetic whiplash and weird, dark jokes.

And while Kaos sometimes collapses under its own weight, it offers up some surprisingly sharp reflections on the modern world:

— It’s funny how emotional intelligence is starting to outshine righteousness. Zeus rules, sure, but everyone’s walking on eggshells around his feelings. Sound familiar?

— Fate isn’t what it used to be. Even in Greek myths, you can pivot, rewrite, rebel. Eurydice and Caneus both find power in unexpected second acts. There’s something refreshing about that.

— And then there’s the Underworld: grim, gray, full of dead-end jobs… and somehow the only place where people seem to find meaning. Flow state in hell is real, apparently. And the gods? Too busy throwing poolside tantrums to notice.

If you’re a mythology purist, you’ll scream. If you like chaos with a capital K, you’ll binge. And if you’re somewhere in between—tired of clean moral lines and hungry for a bit of glorious narrative sprawl—KAOS might just scratch the itch.

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