Kaos, Netflix review - playing fast and profuse with the Greek myths

The ancient Greeks would probably have liked a lot about Charlie Covell‘s manipulation of mythic material. After all, Euripides was prepared to have a laugh about the notion of Helen whisked off to Egypt while a phantom version wrought havoc in Troy. Helen doesn’t figure in this mostly modern-dress gods-vs-humans drama, but so many other legendary figures do, as well as several you probably won’t have heard of.

There’s some focus, but only up to a point, and the diverse playlist of music tracks isn't as smart as it thinks it is. The mythic rule of three gives us a tacky, supersaturated Olympus, graffitied city on earth (nominally Heraklion, actually filmed around Spain) and black-and-white Underworld, while three main stories get twisted to the ends of the “Fuck the Gods” theme (resonant today, of course – though here the Gods are real and they don't give a toss).

Zeus, a soulless killer enhanced by Jeff Goldblum’s deadpan wit and with an icy consort in the shape of Janet McTeer’s magnificent Hera (the two pictured below), wants to avoid a prophecy from which not even the chief god seems immune. Working against that are Ari(adne, a feisty Leila Farzad) battling against labyrinth-loving papa Minos (Stanley Townsend), a Eurydice (Riddy, the soulful Aurora Perrineau) who’s fallen out of love with her Orpheus – a bad pop star, to judge from his dreadful song about her for a mass audience, though Killian Scott does what he can with the character – and the one we don’t really know about, Caeneus. It was a good idea to take a legend about a sex change and cast a sympathetic trans actor in the part, Misia Butler, though Caeneus – formerly Caenis as brought up among Amazons – is the least well-shaped ingredient in the mix.

There are good gags along the various journeys, though few of them come from the tiresome knowing to-cameras of Stephen Dillane's narrator Prometheus. Hera has a giant cabinet of plaintive tongues, and rather more sinsterly a bunch of tongueless Tacitas (adapted from Roman, rather than Greek, mythology) to escort her. McTeer also has one of the best lines on the phone to lover Poseidon (Cliff Curtis), a weary “he’s started a war room and he's killing the ball boys” as Zeus shoots at the wrong targets for his missing gold watch. The thief, Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), spread a little thinly between plot-lines, takes Orpheus to a desert club called The Cave where Suzy Eddie Izzard's Lachis (Lachy) leads a trio of laid-back Fates as game-show judges. The underworld’s control centre is like a late Soviet bureaucracy run by a northern Englsh couple, David Thewlis’s Hades and his wife Persephone (Rakie Ayola, the two pictured below). She later dismisses all we may have read about her and provides one of the few moments of sharp emotion when she makes the loveless gods face up to the reality of her successful marriage. As in most good fantasies (Wagner's Ring, Ragnarok), the main theme is the power of love versus the love of power. Who will win out, gods or the humans they swat like flies? There’s a truly effective climax where the immortals watch a decisive battle in the labyrinth – no plot-spoiler – on live celestial TV; here the series’ mix of joky satire and serious suspense finally meshes. Then it all goes pear-shaped in an attempt not to tie up too many loose ends in the hope of a second series. Will I watch it? Yes, if only to see what Covell and co give us next, and whether the likes of Athena, Apollo and Aphrodite will make an appearance. But as a narrative this doesn’t quite join the pantheon of the big Netflix deities.

• Kaos on Netflix
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