"Blessed Olympia. Vero."
"A line appears, the order wanes, the Family falls, and Kaos reigns."
— The prophecy
Kaos is a 2024 fantasy dramedy series created by Charlie Covell (The End of the F***ing World).
Set in an alternate present where the Greek Pantheon exists and is worshipped the world over, the king of the gods, Zeus (Jeff Goldblum) becomes increasingly stressed and paranoid over a prophecy that could spell the end of his reign. This prophecy may or may not involve three mortals — Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), Caeneus (Misia Butler), and Ariadne (Leila Farzad).
The show also stars Janet McTeer as Hera, Cliff Curtis as Poseidon, David Thewlis as Hades, Killian Scott as Orpheus, Nabhaan Rizwan as Dionysus, Rakie Ayola as Persephone, Stanley Townsend as Minos, and Stephen Dillane as Prometheus.
The series premiered on Netflix on August 29, 2024. The show was canceled after only one season
.
Previews: First Look, Teaser, Trailer
Kaos includes examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptational Species Change:
- Polyphemus isn't a cyclops but a one-eyed man.
- The goddess Hestia is Zeus' childhood puppy according to Prometheus.
- Advertising by Association: The first look boasts the series as being "from the writer of The End of the F***ing World and the producers of Chernobyl".
- Amicable Exes: At the end of the first season Orpheus and Eurydice mutually decide to end their relationship on good terms.
- Benevolent Conspiracy: Started by Prometheus with the help of the Fates. On Earth the Furies, Caeneus and Eurydice's mothers are part of it, and Medusa and Charon help in the Underworld. All aim to bring the prophecy held by Zeus, Eurydice, Caeneus and Ariadne to fruition and bring down Zeus.
- Censored Child Death: In episode 2, Hera orders Zeus to kill the baby from his latest affair. He snaps the baby’s neck onscreen, though the baby is just out of frame.
- Character Title: Caeneus' True Name is the eponymous Kaos.
- Coconut Superpowers: Despite the gods' much-trumpeted power, very little divine spectacle is actually shown on screen — Zeus never even throws a visible thunderbolt (though the results of him doing so are heard off-screen in a very horrifying way).
- Coins for the Dead: Taking inspiration from the Greek myth source material, humans in the setting should be buried with a coin that will grant them passage through the Underworld and eventually "the Frame". Unfortunately, Orpheus takes Eurydice's, resulting in her passage through the Frame being delayed. This is evidently not uncommon as she ends up in a room with other "Unresolved" and must work for the Underworld for 200 years to pay off this debt.
- Confessional: The tacita, tongueless priestesses whom people can confide in, are common in the setting.
- Cute Kitten: Orpheus asks Dionysus to watch their kitten Dennis, whom Dionysus takes to and starts toting around.
- Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: When Zeus is interrogating his ballboys over his missing watch—and shooting them when he doesn’t like their answers—one of them tries to blame the theft on the ballboy Zeus just killed. Zeus’ reaction makes it clear he knows it’s a lie.
- Deity of Human Origin: The narrator says that Zeus and the other gods were originally mortal humans, but the show never gives a detailed story.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Scenes set in the Underworld are in black and white.
- Don't Fear the Reaper: Hades and Persephone have tried to make the Underworld quite welcoming, complete with orientation videos for the newly dead and even installing divers to encourage and comfort souls during the swim through the Lethe. It's then cruelly subverted, as the true purpose of the Frame is to harvest energy from souls to power the gods' divinity. The souls are still intact but reduced to crumbling statues hidden underneath the Underworld itself.
- Divine Race Lift: The Greek gods are portrayed by a very diverse group of actors, none of whom are Greek or even fit into the more traditional white-washed versions of the gods (Zeus himself is played by a Jewish actor, his sister Hera is English, and his brother Poseidon is Maori).
- Exact Words: Minos' prophecy says that "Your end begins in the marital bed. The first child to draw breath will kill you dead." Everyone interprets this as "his firstborn child will kill him", and so the elder twin Glaucus is imprisoned in a labyrinth...but it's actually literal. The younger twin Ariadne is described as coming into the world "screaming" while Glaucus is described as having been "born blue", and thus "not breathing". Meaning Ariadne literally drew breath first...and is the one to kill Minos. The Fates even piggyback off this assumption when Poseidon asks them if a prophecy could be defied: they truthfully tell him that Minos could kill his son, conveniently leaving out that the prophecy isn't referring to Glaucus.
- Express Delivery: Hera hates that Zeus keeps trying to knock mortal women up, so she visits his current pregnant lover, then has her undergo the rest of the pregnancy over the course of a few seconds, orders Zeus to kill the baby... And then turns the woman into a bee.
- Facial Markings: Trojans sport vertical lines on their noses. It's another hint to the identity of the seemingly crazy woman who accosts Riddy in the first episode: the Trojan princess Cassandra.
- Fantastic Ghetto: In this modernized Greek myth setting, Troy has already fallen and its refugees are a persecuted minority who live in "Troytown", a ghetto in Krete.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- The truck that kills Eurydice is seen very briefly — but it's got Serpent Solutions on its side, referencing that the mythological Eurydice was killed by a snake.
- Various blink-and-you'll-miss-it set dressings in Krete allude to other myths — magazines and newspapers like "Echo"note , "Hector's Herald"note , and "Chaossa", cereals named "Spartan Crunch", "Achilles Heels"note , and "Gaea's Granola", a gas station named "Tyndareus"note ...
- Pause on the Furies' hit list during their introduction and you'll see that the "Terry" they drive to suicide is short for Tereus, who in myth was a king of Thrace who raped his sister-in-law and cut out her tongue.
- Freeze-Frame Introduction: Every deity gets a freeze-frame with their name and domain.
- The Ghost: Other members of the Greek pantheon — Ares, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hermes, Hephaestus, and Demeter — are mentioned but play no role in the story (implicitly because Zeus is such a jerk that they want nothing to do with him if they can help it), at least in season one.
- Hereditary Republic: Minos is referred to as president of Krete, but his daughter Ariadne has been expected to succeed him since birth. A conversation between them clarifies that Krete doesn't have real elections like Athens.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The Fates' backdoor entrance to the Underworld is in an unguarded dumpster.Lachesis: It's discreet.
- Impaled Palm: Lachesis impales Orpheus' hand on a piano to compel him to reveal that he took his wife's coin.
- Interfaith Smoothie: Humans in the show worship the Greek pantheon with some elements of other religions: the confessional-like tacita and funerals are rather Christian, while the notion of being reincarnated into a next life befitting your actions in the current one is reminiscent of karma.
- Jacob and Esau: Minos dotes on his daughter Ariadne while his wife Pasiphae remains obsessed with Ariadne's dead twin Glaucus and doesn't have a word to spare for her otherwise. But after Ariadne kills Minos for turning Glaucus into the Minotaur, Pasiphae embraces her daughter.
- Match Cut: Orpheus is told to mark every blemish on Riddy's body on a mannequin. As he draws a mole on the back of the mannequin's neck, the scene cuts to the same mole on the nape of Riddy's neck as she stands on the train to the Lethe.
- Meaningful Name: Orpheus and Riddy's kitten is named Dennis, a name derived from "Dionysus". Guess which god ends up catsitting him?
- Modernized God: The series is a modern reimagining of Greek myths, and several of its figures have been adapted to the present day. For example, god of wine/pleasure Dionysus is a party boy; Orpheus is a famous musician; Poseidon is a pescatarian who owns a superyacht.
- This also applies to the mortals from the same mythology, who are depicted as relatable people with modern clothes, jobs, and struggles while retaining their names and roles.
- Natural Disaster Cascade: Zeus sends a series of natural disasters, such as fires, earthquakes, and storms, to earth to strike fear in the hearts of mortals.
- Non-Appearing Title: Orpheus' song "Eurydice" doesn't mention her name in the lyrics.
- Not His Sled: Orpheus goes to the Underworld to plead for Eurydice's life and successfully brings her back to life. He does however metaphorically lose her when he looks at her as it is the moment where he finally accepts she doesn't love him anymore.
- Offing the Offspring: In Episode 2, Zeus’ affair with his pregnant mistress is found out by Hera, who had forbade him from making more children. Hera speeds up the pregnancy straight into birth and orders Zeus to kill the baby, which he does.
- Ominous Latin Chanting: One segment of the soundtrack song "Kaos 1" that plays during dramatic scenes involving the Greek gods goes "Celestis, divinitus, insania, vero..."note fitting with the divine conspiracy of the plot.
- Once More, with Clarity: In episode 2, the scene of Orpheus alone in the church staring at Riddy's casket from episode 1 is replayed to reveal he took the coin that was supposed to pay for her journey through the underworld.
- Only One Name: Despite the world being heavily modernized, nobody uses surnames.
- Outliving One's Offspring:
- In the first episode, Riddy's mother witnesses her daughter getting hit by a bus and killed.
- Ari's mother Pasiphae has not taken the death of Ari's twin Glaucus as a baby well at all. Rather than celebrate Ari's birthdays, every year Pasiphae has Ari pose for a sculpture of Glaucus. She keeps the thirty or so statues in her bedroom. Glaucus turns out to have been the Minotaur all along rather than killed as a baby, but dies shortly after this is revealed.
- In the Cave, Anatole and his wife are trying to bring back their young son from the Underworld.
- Hecuba, the former queen of Troy, and her daughter-in-law Andromache are minor characters who are still understandably bitter at the brutal deaths of their respective husbands and children. Andromache's son Astyanax is revealed to have survived his rumored death, but is later murdered alongside a few of his compatriots on Minos' orders. After Minos' death, Andromache strikes a deal with the new ruler of Krete, Ari, against the gods.
- Caeneus' childhood best friend was exiled from the Amazons for being a boy. He tried to sneak back in but was murdered for it; Caeneus watches the mother tearfully hold her son's dead body.
- Caeneus' mother also outlived him, and he's been waiting for her to turn up in the Underworld. She's in on the "Kaos" prophecy-conspiracy and commits suicide on an instructed day to see him.
- Paranoid Autocrat: Zeus is driven mad by paranoia about losing his throne and vague prophecies foretelling his downfall. The other gods try to reassure or rebuke him, he lashed out at them.
- Pop-Star Composer:
- The show's score is by Isabella Summers of Florence + the Machine.
- Orpheus' song "Eurydice" is Bastille-like for a reason: it's written by the band's lead singer/songwriter Dan Smith.
- Prophecy Twist: Two major ones in the first season:
- In the first episode, a loony woman tells Eurydice that today will be the day she will leave her husband Orpheus. Riddy thinks it means she'll dump him (she's fallen out of love already but is too scared to leave him), but she is hit by a bus and killed instead. Cassandra's take? "Told you you'd leave him today. You leave everyone today."
- In the seventh episode, Minos, whose prophecy has told him he'll be killed by his first child to draw breath, attempts to thwart this by imprisoning his firstborn child for life and then, finally, by killing him. Unfortunately, it's been a running private joke that while Minos' son was first born, he came out "blue" - i.e., not breathing - and his twin sister, born after him, "came out screaming"...
- Released to Elsewhere: Souls in the Underworld can cross the Lethe and enter the frame to undergo a reincarnation-like process called Renewal, where their atoms are returned to Earth as something befitting their actions in life. Too good to be true? Yes - rather than being reincarnated back on Earth, their souls actually power the Meander, the fountain that keeps the gods powerful and immortal. Renewal does exist, as Hades tells Zeus that they need to start letting some souls actually Renew since the Frame is reaching maximum capacity, but he refuses to listen.
- The Rich Have White Stuff: Zeus and Hera, king and queen of the gods, are introduced traipsing around their lavish Neoclassical mansion (of course predominantly white and gold) in crisp white outfits.
- Second Episode Introduction: Caeneus, Hades, Persephone, Charon and the Fates are introduced in the second episode.
- Seeks Another's Resurrection: Every contestant in the Cave is seeking to bring someone back from the Underworld.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In a final conversation with Zeus, the Fates outright state that all prophecies are in fact like this, that it's only their subjects' obsession with making them come true (or paranoia about preventing them) that leads them to come to pass at all. For instance, Minos tries to defy his prophecy that says he will be killed by his first child to draw breath by having the elder twin Glaucus imprisoned in the labyrinth, and then killing him. This only serves to enrage Ariadne, the younger twin who is said to have been born "screaming" (meaning she was "breathing") as opposed to being "born blue" (i.e. "not breathing"), into stabbing him to death and fulfilling the prophecy.
- Stealth Pun: Zeus is addicted to the water of the Meander, which is the source of the gods' divine powers. He's literally drunk on power.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: In the third episode, the jaunty The Andrews Sisters number "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag And Smile, Smile, Smile" accompanies a brutal gladiator fight.
- Strange Salute: The show has an "Amen" equivalent for the setting's worship of the Greek pantheon — mortal worshippers will touch their palms to their foreheads and say "Vero", Latin for "Truth".
- Taking You with Me: The defeated warrior in the Munis gladiator fight takes out the victor with his dying breath.
- Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born: Despite needing an heir, Minos was hesitant to have kids because his prophecy said his "first child to draw breath would [kill] him dead". With the help of his patron Poseidon, he tries to circumvent this by siring fraternal twins Glaucus and Ariadne and stashing away/killing the firstborn, Glaucus, while raising Ari as his successor. That the prophecy says "child" is just another reason he doesn't suspect it actually refers to his daughter.