Jeff Goldblum to star in Netflix’s Greek mythology comedy

Play like PercyJackson for adults, with a shot American Gods And Hadestown and as an encore the black comedy from Netflix Chaos is packed with big ideas that creator Charlie Covell struggles to explore in the necessary depth.

In eight one-hour episodes, my reaction to Chaos and the often clever inversion of mythological tropes went from “This is really cool, 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 cheeky tone, and little investment in execution, the show goes from promising to frustrating to disappointing — albeit with tantalizing hints of what could have been.

Jeff Goldblum commands all the attention in his role as Zeus, the all-powerful but deeply neurotic king of the gods and patron of a humanity that still worships them. Reigning from Mount Olympus with his sister and wife Hera (Janet McTeer), Zeus is obsessed with the sincerity of human sacrifice and a mysterious prophecy he believes could spell his downfall. In his pettiness and insecurity, he has banished his brothers Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) and Hades (David Thewlis) to the sea and the underworld respectively, and condemned his former best pal Prometheus (Stephen Dillane) to eternal torture. He is so annoying that the only one of his children who even answers the phone is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), a bored club boy who longs for more respect from dear old dad.

Down on Earth, people go about their business, convinced that they are just puppets of the gods, the goddesses of fate and the furies. But are they perhaps about to overthrow the gods and establish the supremacy of free will? Somehow! Maybe! The only thing that is certain is that Cassandra (Billie Piper) has already tried to warn everyone, no matter what happens.

The key to overthrowing the gods may lie with three mortals. Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), known as “Riddy”, has begun to fall out of love with her husband Orpheus (Killian Scott) – or at least she is tired of being nothing more than the muse of a global pop star. Ari (Leila Farzad), known as “Ariadne”, is the daughter of royalty, but she is fed up of being defined by childhood trauma. And then there is Caeneus (Misia Butler), who has a menial job in the underworld and is lamenting a family betrayal.

Especially in the first few episodes, it is clear what attracted Covell to the idea of ​​a modern society in which the Greek gods seem to be the only religious authority.

For an hour or two, the world building is dynamic. Set in Greece (mainly Crete) but filmed somewhere in Spain, it is all about Chaos feels a little off. I enjoyed exploring the cultural and spiritual ripples that would lead to, for example, the variety of grains in this society or its clothing and architecture. The series constantly mentions various popular characters from the pages of Edith Hamilton or D’Aulaires. The effect is similar, with a more satirical tone, to how Mike Flanagan uses family melodramas and Poe references in The Fall of the House of Usher.

If you’re a myth fan, you’ll have fun figuring out when Covell is sticking to canon, when he’s making playful corrections for contemporary audiences, and when he’s just saying, “Screw it, let’s stick with the name but leave everything else aside.” The series wants to think about mythmaking, the stories we rely on to make sense of our lives, and questions of authorship of those stories. I wish it could deliver that commentary better and had its own deeper meaning.

Unfortunately, the series becomes a nearly non-stop stream of neat little things held together by an over-aggressive soundtrack and intrusive Promethean voiceovers rather than any real narrative. The “plot” increasingly becomes a bickering of deities, punctuated by Riddy’s trip to the underworld, punctuated by everything Ari does, with no momentum to speak of. It all boils down to an ending that finally felt like it had put an end to the chaos in Chaosexcept that I didn’t care.

It’s the exception rather than the rule when a good idea is pursued on any level. So the provocative detail that a trans man being approached by the Amazons gets a second mention is almost considered essential, even if I suspect it should be the premise of its own TV series rather than a footnote in this one. More often, the best concepts are ignored or undermined by hasty retractions. Just as the black-and-white bureaucratic vision of the underworld goes from monochromatic to monotonous, turning into a weakly conceived “twist” that somehow carries less weight than the similar twist in… Sausage party.

Ideally, stories like this open up their worlds over time. But the world of Chaos becomes smaller and less extensive – far too adult for young viewers, not really mature enough for adults.

Since the plot lacks fun, the series’ entertainment value comes from the acting performances of its exceptional cast.

Every line Goldblum reads is a little treasure. Especially in the current political climate, an interpretation in which Zeus, after a life of omnipotence and isolation, has become a tyrant who is at least as weird as he is evil is very funny. None of the supporting cast necessarily feels like they’re on the same show, or even the same five or six shows – Goldblum plays Wes Anderson, McTeer plays Shakespeare, and Curtis works on his tan on a yacht.

Taken on its own, though, it’s easy to appreciate McTeer’s regal bearing and vicious scheming, Rizwan’s exuberant delight in the mortal world, and Thewlis’s mournful intellectualization of the afterlife (he’s paired with Rakie Ayola, whose Persephone is perhaps the biggest departure from the classical standard). Butler’s portrayal was my favorite performance of the bunch, while cameo appearances from the likes of Piper, Debi Mazar, and Suzy Eddie Izzard keep things lively.

Netflix ordered first Chaos in 2018 – even if you accept a global pandemic and multiple industry strikes, that was a VERY long time ago – and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since, in part because Covell’s previous outing on the streamer was the hilariously dark road trip romance The end of the damn world. Chaos offers little more than a hint of comparatively crackling dialogue and even less of a coherent worldview, nihilistic or otherwise.

You can still sense what I think was an enticing template that showed Covell’s enthusiasm and got Netflix to get involved. But you can also sense the places where someone was hoping to come back and replace the generic filler with big drama or comedy, and instead just left the filler.