Jeff Goldblum is deliciously good as Zeus in this Greek myth update
Kaos ★★★½
Netflix
Dressed in billionaire leisurewear and prone to killing Olympia’s servants, Jeff Goldblum is deliciously good as Zeus in this blithe black comedy that updates classical Greek mythology.
The King of the Gods is empowered by the faith of humans, but the hubris is all his own. “He’s a transcendent, unmitigated bastard,” notes Prometheus (Stephen Dillane), who Zeus has exiled to a mountain where a bird pecks away at his liver. Praise be, we have Succession vibes.
Janet McTeer as Hera and Jeff Goldblum as Zeus in KAOS.Credit: Justin Downing/Netflix
Kaos was created by Charlie Covell, the British writer who adapted The End of the F---ing World for Netflix. Covell is a hard-nosed optimist with a mordant sense of humour – love, for example, is possible, but we only realise its value at the most inopportune of times. The narrative impetus for the eight episodes of the show’s debut season is Zeus finding a wrinkle and feeling vulnerable. He probably should. His wife, Hera (Janet McTeer), ignores him, and his children, including Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), feel undervalued.
The show takes its time. The first three episodes introduce a group of human characters who are unknowingly central to a plan to depose Zeus. The likes of Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), who is drifting away from her needy musician husband Orpheus (Killian Scott), live on the island of Crete, one of several Greek city-states that look contemporary but still worship the gods in their daily lives. Another, Caneus (Misia Butler), is already working in the Underworld, where the dead go for processing. Thankfully, there’s an orientation video on the boat over.
This is a concept that can readily become sprawling. There’s always another modern twist on ancient archetypes, or a calamitous cold open, to deploy. But Covell has a way of making the fickle flourishes great fun – if anyone should be debating fate and offering surreptitious access to the Underworld for the living, it’s Eddie Izzard’s Lachesis. Otherworldly alliances are formed and ancient enmities are exercised. Does Zeus have a mood board full of ideas about how to punish humans and get them praying for salvation? Absolutely.
Eddie Izzard as Lachesis in Kaos.Credit: Justin Downing/Netflix
The tone is mordant but curiously authentic. The weirdness doesn’t preclude genuine emotion. If you’ve read – or better yet, read to children – the heroic Percy Jackson novels about a present-day boy discovering his place among the Greek gods, this interpretation is a reminder of how freaky the source material is. But it’s also a commentary on faith, the control institutions impose on followers, and the machinations of the 1 per cent to remain untouchable. After all, what delusional tech titan doesn’t yearn to be considered a god?
The Body Next Door: a mysterious corpse is found wrapped in 41 sheets of plastic.Credit: Stan
The Body Next Door ★★★★
Stan
When does a true crime story tip over so that the testimony and research start to simply feel grim and unfulfilling? It’s a line this three-part British docuseries comes close to but thankfully doesn’t cross, as it tells the story behind a mysterious corpse found in a Welsh village in 2015. The body was wrapped in plastic, 41 sheets in total. The truth, carefully chipped away at to maintain a what-comes-next immediacy, has just as many layers.
There are some false starts to learning what police discovered in the house in the village of Beddau, which is understandable because the story of how the decomposed corpse was discovered is alone genuinely bonkers. The focus comes to be the home’s recently deceased resident, Leigh Ann Sabine, who is evocatively sketched by the locals who knew her, including friends and her very chatty hairdresser.
Once Sabine’s adult children in New Zealand are introduced and their own horrific experiences growing up are detailed, The Body Next Door has multiple eras to cut between and, more importantly, themes to cut through the jaw-dropping revelations. What are the limits, if any, of narcissism, the series asks, and what consolation remains for those left in its destructive wake? The satisfaction here is not so much what the truth is, but that one was locked down.
Nina Toussaint-White in the terse British police thriller Witness Number 3.
Witness Number 3
BritBox
This British thriller came out in 2022, but it hasn’t lost an ounce of its terrifying menace or moral quandary. A casual glance out the window of her salon is all it takes for hairdresser Jodie Packer (Nina Toussaint-White) to witness an accused murderer and his victim together. When the police ask her to formally identify the suspect, Jodie tentatively does what she believes is the right thing, but thereafter she and her family are tormented by the man’s criminal associates. The limited series is pushing crime nightmare buttons, but it never loses its topicality or focus.
Selena Gomez, Martin Short and Steve Martin are back for a fourth season of Only Murders in the Building.Credit: AP
Only Murders in the Building (season 4)
Disney+
They’ve left the building. The new season of one of streaming’s best – and most reliable – comedies makes its annual August return with the central trio of Manhattan podcasters and pals Charles (Steve Martin), Mabel (Selena Gomez) and Oliver (Martin Short) travelling to Los Angeles, where a Hollywood studio wants to make a movie about their amateur detective adventures. Cue the celebrity cameos. Obviously, the pleasure of discovery has dissipated with this show, but the writing retains a daffy energy and the leads have such a snappy dynamic together. I’m still in.
Stasi FC
DocPlay
The insidious, soulless control East Germany’s security apparatus exerted on the Cold War state has been well charted, but as this football documentary shows, there are always new and bleak avenues to consider. In the late 1970s, Stasi head Erich Mielke decided that his favourite team, Berliner FC Dynamo, should be successful. They promptly won 10 successive league titles, with the fix made clear by pitifully laughable game footage. The cost of this travesty, and the means of defiance, are provided through interviews with the era’s leading footballers, such as defector Falko Gotz.
Beacon 23 (season 2)
Amazon Prime
The second season of this science-fiction thriller continues to be some of the knottiest deep space television doing the rounds. There’s far less of Game of Thrones star Lena Headey as Aster, the mysterious woman who found her way to an isolated beacon manned by Halan (Stephen James), but the forces revealed around them in the first season continue to generate deception and conflict. The show’s interest in identity and technology is furthered this season, with more of a focus on artificial intelligence and its possible physical evolution.
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