The Summer’s Hottest Intellectual Property? Greek Mythology
5 min read
In an 1898 issue of The Atlantic, the classical scholar Thomas Dwight Goodell published an impassioned defense of original Greek literature, which some of his contemporaries had criticized as irrelevant. Compared with the complex plots of then-modern plays, Greek tragedies appeared “tame and colorless” to some readers, bogged down by oration instead of action. Goodell’s essay lamented a seemingly pervasive belief among poets, playwrights, and scholars that “the Greek drama is merely the germ of which the Elizabethan drama is the full flower.”
More than 125 years later, that germ is still sprouting. The stories and conventions of Greek tragedy continue to enrich English literature—and make their way into new artistic mediums. One of the most recent works to draw extensively from these myths and narratives is Kaos, an eight-part Netflix series that revolves around a gutsy scheme to dethrone an insecure, tyrannical Zeus (played by Jeff Goldblum). Along with its amusing study of the surly deity, Kaos reinterprets classic tales of figures such as Eurydice, Ariadne, and Caeneus, with their themes of familial strife, populist rebellion, and the struggle between free will and destiny. And with its quick pans and ultra-saturated colors, Kaos evokes the vibrant maximalism of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. The result is a darkly funny, visually rich saga that highlights the enduring relevance of these moral quandaries and character studies—without taking itself too seriously.
Kaos arrives at an interesting moment for the classics. In recent years, books such as Madeline Miller’s Circe have introduced new readers to ancient myths through the perspectives of women. These “feminist retellings” of famed Greek tales have become a massively popular mini-genre in part because they reframe familiar dramas around characters who have rarely taken center stage—an intriguing choice in the years following #MeToo, especially to readers in highly engaged social-media communities like BookTok. And because pop culture is undeniably influenced by the trends that drive the publishing industry, some of these books are now being adapted into visual works.
Unlike some retellings, including the recent Elyse John novel, Orphia and Eurydicius, Kaos doesn’t flip the genders of its protagonists to emphasize that women can be heroes too. But it does cleverly interrogate how gender informs its characters’ experiences of life on Earth, in the Underworld, and even on Mount Olympus—and, by extension, how the characters are portrayed in the canon itself. For example: The series depicts Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) as a reluctant muse to the rock star Orpheus (Killian Scott). In an early scene, she bristles when her husband says he’s named his latest song after her. (In the chorus, Orpheus poses questions that inadvertently capture how suffocated his wife feels in their marriage: “Is it a little too much / Breathin’ the air from your lungs? / Is it a little bit much / Under the weight of this love?”) That setup helps establish Orpheus’s eventual mission to rescue her from the Underworld as a selfish pursuit, motivated by his desire to possess Eurydice rather than restore her to a life of her own making.
While Orpheus labors to retrieve her, Eurydice meets several other characters whose mythic origins have often been retold through the lens of male violence or aggression. But here, Medusa and Persephone are not feeble captives of the Underworld or scorned women constantly seeking revenge. And Caeneus, a transgender man, gets a new backstory that mercifully supplants the violent rape that catalyzes his transition in the original myth. Kaos balances the weight of these reinterpretations with its irreverent depictions of the most powerful woman on Mount Olympus: Hera (Janet McTeer) may be miserable with the philandering Zeus, but she’d rather hold on to her authority than befriend a woman beneath her status, and so she turns her husband’s affair partners into bees in some of the show’s more creative sequences.
The women and queer characters of Kaos don’t merely serve as the show’s ethical guardrails; they make the fight against Zeus’s despotic reign more dynamic than a simple battle between good and evil. Moral ambiguity is a hallmark of the classics themselves, but it’s also in line with past work from the show’s creator, Charlie Covell, who adapted the dark comedy The End of the F***ing World for TV. That series turned its attention to the misery (and tenderness) in its protagonists, an angsty teenager and a budding killer. In charting their unlikely romance, Covell pulled off a surprising feat of humor and nihilism—which Kaos accomplishes at a grander scale.
For the most part, Kaos pulses with the same offbeat confidence and alluring style. At times, the show strains to reconcile its ancient source material with aesthetic sensibilities clearly influenced by more modern works. Goldblum isn’t just one of several actors to embody Zeus in the past decade; he also plays the role with the same quirky braggadocio he brought to Grandmaster in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, a riff on his own quirky and braggadocious persona. If not for the minor detail of Zeus being a deity, many of the familial conflicts that emerge in the show’s first episode could have easily unfolded on two of the most popular series of the past several years: When he and Hera bicker against the lush, ornate backdrop of Mount Olympus, it’s hard not to recall the palatial Sicilian resort at the center of The White Lotus. And after Zeus rejects a watch given to him by his son Dionysus, he tacks on some fatherly criticism that immediately brings to mind Succession’s cantankerous leader (and the most fidgety of his eager young scions). Aspirational settings and complicated father-son narratives are hardly scarce in pop culture, but in a series that covers less thematic ground, these parallels might register as uninspired. Kaos does much more than recast fictional billionaires as literal deities, though—it also spends considerable time with the people whose lives they upend.
One of the most consistent elements of Greek mythology is how it can help us glean new meaning—and real catharsis—from the familiar. In a reboot-obsessed entertainment climate, Kaos and other inventive Greek retellings model a more generative approach to intellectual property by building on, rather than simply rehashing, their source material. However ageless family dysfunction might be, the best of these recent works still manage to make every unhappy child of Zeus—mortal or divine—unhappy in their own way. The characters’ specific grievances (and triumphs) reflect the eras that refashioned them, even as the foundation of their stories remains the same. As Goodell wrote so long ago, “Many generations will pass from the scene, and many a little system and literary school will have its day, before those plays lose their freshness and their power to elevate and charm.” Kaos is yet another testament to that prophecy.
