Kaos review: comic retelling of Greek mythology starring Jeff Goldblum

Jeff Goldblum's Zeus is a 'neurotic, leisurewear-clad billionaire'

(Image credit: Netflix / FlixPix / Alamy Stock Photo / Alamy)

published 5 September 2024

From video games to novels to musical theatre, "revisionist retellings of ancient Greek myths have been having something of a moment lately", said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But few have been as punchy as Netflix's "Kaos", from the British writer Charlie Covell, who is best known for Channel 4's "The End of the F***ing World".

Billed as a "Succession"- or "White Lotus"-flavoured take on the gods of Olympus, it stars Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, depicted here as a neurotic, leisurewear-clad billionaire. He's first seen "mincing discontentedly through his pink mountain-top shag pad", said Camilla Long in The Sunday Times. The designers turn out to have had "Barbie levels of fun" throughout. Zeus's spotting of a wrinkle on his forehead triggers a midlife crisis and a complicated plot featuring versions of Cassandra (Billie Piper), Hades (David Thewlis), Prometheus (Stephen Dillane) and others. Structured as a sour comedy of manners rather than a fantasy, it's "engrossing, imaginative and fun".

The series is perhaps an episode or two too long, but what's great about this "enjoyably unusual" show is that it "never takes itself too seriously", said Carol Midgely in The Times: the Underworld here resembles "a drab multistorey car park at an Amazon warehouse". After a while, you start to wonder if the ancient gods aren't so remote from today's "brat billionaires, using the world as their whimsical plaything". Wouldn't, "say, Elon Musk secretly love to chain Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg to a rock and have an eagle peck out their livers every day?"