Jeff Goldblum Leads Netflix's Greek Mythology Comedy

Play as Percy Jackson for adults, with a pinch of American Gods AND City of Hades for good measure, Netflix's dark comedy Chaos It's full of big ideas that creator Charlie Covell struggles to explore in any depth.

Over eight hour-long episodes, my answer to Chaos and its often clever reversal of mythological tropes has gone from “This is really good, I can’t wait to see what they do with it” to “This is interesting, but I know it’s not going anywhere” to “Meh.” With an impressive cast, a brash tone, and little investment in a substantial sequel, the show goes from promising to frustrating to disappointing, albeit with teasing hints of what could have been.

Jeff Goldblum commands attention throughout as Zeus, the all-powerful but ferociously neurotic king of the gods and general enabler of a humanity that still worships them. Ruling from Mount Olympus with his sister-wife Hera (Janet McTeer), Zeus is obsessed with the sincerity of human sacrifices and a mysterious prophecy he fears will spell his downfall. In his pettiness and insecurity, he has ostracized his brothers Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) and Hades (David Thewlis) to the sea and the Underworld, respectively, and condemned his former best friend Prometheus (Stephen Dillane) to permanent torture. He's so annoying that the only one of his children who returns his phone calls is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), a bored boy longing for more respect from his dear old dad.

On Earth, people go about their business, all certain that they are mere pawns of the gods, the Fates, and the Furies. But could they be on the verge of potentially subverting the deities and establishing the supremacy of free will? Sort of! Maybe! The only thing that is certain is that, no matter what happens, Cassandra (Billie Piper) has already tried to warn everyone.

The key to overthrowing the gods may lie with three mortals. Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), or “Riddy” for short, has begun to fall out of love with her husband Orpheus (Killian Scott) — or at least, she's tired of being just a muse for a global pop star. Ari (Leila Farzad), or “Ariadne” for long and short, is the daughter of royalty, but she's tired of being defined by childhood trauma. Then there's Caeneus (Misia Butler), who works a low-level job in the Underworld and laments a family betrayal.

Especially in the first two episodes, it's clear what attracted Covell to the idea of ​​a modern society where the Greek gods seem to be the only religion around.

For an hour or two, the world-building is dynamic. Set in Greece (mostly Crete) but filmed somewhere in Spain, everything about Chaos it just seems a little askew. I enjoyed trying to understand the cultural and spiritual ripples that would have led to, say, the range of cereals in this society, or its clothing and architecture. The series constantly references different beloved figures from the pages of Edith Hamilton or D'Aulaires. The effect is similar, with a more satirical tone, to the way Mike Flanagan mixed family melodrama and Poe references in The Fall of the House of Usher.

If you’re a myth lover, you’ll enjoy seeing when Covell sticks to the canon, when she makes playful corrections for a contemporary audience, and when she simply says, “Screw it, let’s stick with the name but throw out everything else.” The show is meant to reflect on mythmaking, the tales we rely on to give our lives purpose, and questions of authorship of those stories. I wish it were better at offering that commentary, and had a deeper meaning to it.

Unfortunately, the series becomes an almost non-stop stream of neat bits and pieces, fused together by an overly aggressive soundtrack and an intrusive Promethean voiceover rather than a proper narrative. The “plot” becomes more and more bickering gods interspersed with Riddy's trip to the Underworld interspersed with whatever Ari is doing, with no real momentum to speak of. It builds towards a finale that ultimately seemed to have thrown chaos into Chaosonly that I didn't care anymore.

It's the exception rather than the rule when a good idea is followed up on any level. So the provocative detail of a transgender man pulled from the Amazons getting a second mention almost counts as substantial, though I suspect it should be the premise of a TV series all its own and not a footnote in this one. More frequently, the best concepts are ignored or undermined by hasty retreats. As the bureaucratic black-and-white vision of the Underworld goes from monochromatic to monotone, building to a poorly conceived “plot twist” that somehow carries less weight than the similar plot twist in… Sausage Festival.

Ideally, stories like this open up their worlds as they progress. But the world of Chaos becomes smaller and less rich, too adult for young viewers, but not mature enough for adults.

As the plot runs out of steam, the series' enjoyment comes from the performances of its stellar cast.

Every Goldblum line is a little treasure. Especially in the current political climate, there’s something very funny about a performance in which a life of omnipotence and isolation has turned Zeus into a tyrant who’s at least as weird as he is evil. None of the supporting actors feel, necessarily, like they’re in the same show or even the same five or six shows: Goldblum is playing Wes Anderson, McTeer is playing Shakespeare, and Curtis is working on his tan on a yacht.

In isolation, though, it's easy to appreciate McTeer's regal bearing and ferocious plans, Rizwan's unbridled joy in the mortal world, and Thewlis's grim intellectualization of the afterlife (he's paired with Rakie Ayola, whose Persephone marks perhaps the biggest departure from the classical standard). Butler's performance was my favorite of the humans, while cameos from the likes of Piper, Debi Mazar, and Suzy Eddie Izzard keep things lively.

Netflix has ordered for the first time Chaos in 2018, even accepting a global pandemic and multiple industry strikes, it was a LONG time ago, and I've been dying to see it ever since, partly because Covell's previous credit on the streamer was a hilarious, dark road trip romance The end of the fucking world. Chaos offers only a smidgen of equally crackling dialogue and an even less cohesive worldview, nihilistic or otherwise.

You can still feel what I assume was an enticing undercurrent that showed Covell's enthusiasm and that made Netflix want to come on board. But you can also feel the places where someone was hoping to return and replace the generic gap-filler with a high-end drama or comedy, and instead just left the filler.