This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture Chat — The Greek myths are sacred. Did ‘Kaos’ desecrate them?’
Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today we are talking about the new Netflix series Kaos, which is a modern retelling of Greek mythology. Kaos is as if the Greek gods were living in present-day Greece. Zeus is played by the great Jeff Goldblum. He lives in a gaudy new-money mansion in the sky. King Minos, Eurydice, Orpheus and many other names you would recognise live in the human world in Heraklion, Crete, where people are starting to question the power of the gods. And meanwhile, down in the underworld, things are starting to glitch too. Zeus is becoming increasingly paranoid and authoritarian. Hera and Poseidon are trying to calm him down, and the whole world order is threatened to fall.
[KAOS TRAILER PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
Kaos is zany, it’s gruesome, it’s tragic. And today we’re going to talk about it. I’m Lilah in New York, and as long as the meander flows, I reign. Joining me from London, rumour has it he spotted a vertical wrinkle on his forehead this morning. It’s our great associate arts editor, Josh Spero. Hi, Josh. Welcome.
Josh Spero
How dare you! The Botox would have taken care of all of that.
Lilah Raptopoulos
And joining us from Chicago, I think she just turned my mother into a bee. It’s the FT’s Chicago reporter, Claire Bushey. Hi, Claire.
Claire Bushey
Hello.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to both of you. Thank you for coming.
Josh Spero
Great to be here.
Claire Bushey
Thank you for having us.
Josh Spero
I don’t actually have any Botox, just to make it clear.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Correction. So why don’t we start with the impressions of the show? Did you love it? Did you hate it? Top line. What did you think, Josh?
Josh Spero
I watched the first four episodes, and then I did not feel compelled to watch the final four episodes of the first season. And if I weren’t doing this, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind ever again. It is what Kyle Chayka calls ambient television. The sort of you can watch, you can have it on in the background. It’s actually slightly more distracting than, you know, Emily in Paris or something, because heads get ripped off, which I assume they don’t have Emily in Paris. But it is not kind of compelling in a way that makes you want to pay attention. Which is a shame, because I’m a big fan of, the Greek myths and the whole tradition of Greek myths in culture ever since the Greeks. And this could have been a really great opportunity to entice people with really dramatic, thoughtful, sensitive, but still like fun and gaudy retelling. And instead, it is basically the Marvelisation of the Greek myths.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, wow. That’s brutal. OK, I have follow-up questions, but, first I want to ask Claire. Claire, what did you think? Top line.
Claire Bushey
So, I was kind of like, meh. I thought some of the ways that the Greek myths were adopted were clever, but it was ultimately kind of soulless, and I want to agree with what Josh said about the Marvelisation. I, too, sort of felt like I was watching the Greek gods as part of the Marvel Universe and did not love that.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.
Josh Spero
It’s that kind of introduction of like irony and humour, which is fine, but also it’s so kind of rote by the time you see it in Marvel, and it feels like it wasn’t serving a purpose here. It was just like, this is how we tell, like, epic stories now. So it would be something ironic, something sexy, something bloody.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting. OK. I really liked it. And I’m excited because, we’re going to have a different kind of conversation than I expected. OK. I really liked it. When the show started, it didn’t feel Marvel to me. It felt sort of like the first episode of some combination of The Good Place and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Like, sort of oversaturated, bright, funny. In the first scene, Zeus is in a tracksuit, you know, getting waited on by these cute boys and ball boys wearing short shorts. And I thought, OK, this is going to be fun.
And then the next few episodes, it started to fluctuate in tone in a way that I wasn’t sure about. I couldn’t tell if it was like light and funny or tragic and full of grief and what I was supposed to be feeling. The plot started to get complicated too. But then by episode four or so, I felt like it really fell into itself. And I got back into it, and I watched almost all of the rest of them with a great nostalgia and enjoyment. And I have one more episode left and I can’t wait to go home and watch it.
Josh Spero
I think shows can be glib and tragic and romantic and all of those things, but they can’t do it from the first episode. This is not a spoiler because it happens, because it’s the premise of the first episode, I think. But,Orpheus is dating Eurydice. Orpheus is a rock star. But he’s kind of a sappy rock star, and his songs are really and . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
He’s kind of like a Coldplay, right? He’s kind of like a Chris Martin.
Josh Spero
He’s more like a James Blunt. But Eurydice, his girlfriend, actually wants to get away from him. And then she does because she gets hit by a truck. And that, you know, you can’t after one episode, you cannot feel that as a great tragedy. You’ve only known them for like 55 minutes, and half of which is spent watching Jeff Goldblum, just, you know, gurn. And then how. If they had built up a first season or even a few more episodes to that moment, you’d be like, wow, this is a great romantic tragedy. And you know, you really want to see what happens, but you can’t, like, shove her out of a window after half an hour and be like, isn’t that sad?
Lilah Raptopoulos
So did you both feel, I mean, like I think two things that are sort of probably complicated about this show for a viewer is that like the tone fluctuates and the plot is a lot. There’s like a lot they seem to have to get through. Did you feel like they didn’t get the balance right on either of those?
Claire Bushey
I mean, I did not love the tonal shifts. Part of this is maybe just that, like, I’m not the right audience here because I don’t love black comedy from the start. So, you know, I’m like, this is a sad thing that’s happening. Why are we laughing about it? But in terms of the plot. I feel like when you’re working with Greek mythology, it’s kind of like fanfiction, right? Because you are taking characters that everyone knows and then it’s kind of up to you what you do with them. And then it’s like whether that feels true to your audience. And I think that it did not deliver within like the terms of the universe that was created. Like, at the at the end of the day, I didn’t feel like they really explained like why when X happens, Y has to happen, if that makes sense.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes. And can I ask both of you, where are you coming to this from? Like are you fans of Greek mythology. Are you fans of Jeff Goldblum? Josh you have a degree in classics, right?
Josh Spero
I do, and a lot of that is about Greek mythology and how it is interpreted and received. And one of the things that I love about Greek mythology is that there really is no fixed version of it. There was never really a fixed version when they were being invented. You know, you would have these poets going from town to town, telling stories like which became the Iliad and the Odyssey. And if you were in a certain town, you would emphasise the bits where that town’s heroes did well. So these things were very flexible. So I have absolutely no problem with these myths being fucked about with basically.
But I don’t think you can do it in a way that is almost flippant. Which is my problem. As for Jeff Goldblum, I’m not sure every role that has Jeff Goldblum in it needs to be played like he is, in fact, Jeff Goldblum. Like, he’s an actor. He can presumably do other characters than Jeff Goldblum.
Lilah Raptopoulos
(laughter) Claire, what about you?
Claire Bushey
Well, so I am a classics minor dropout. I did that for about 30 seconds before I realised I was, like, never going to learn ancient Greek and that it was incredibly bad idea for me to try. But I do love Greek mythology, and what I loved about it, you know, when I first encountered it growing up was the sex and the death and the monsters and the heroes and just the grandness of it all. And I think what I like about it now is the archetypal nature of it.
You know, I was very, very sick a few years ago. And then when I finally finished treatment, I had to head about like a year where I was truly grieving the person that I had used to be. And when I was trying to explain to people how I was feeling, which was completely out of my mind, I used the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. And I was like, it is like trying to bring someone back from the dead, and you can’t. And so, when I say like there’s something in these that we can really relate to, I’m speaking from personal experience.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And so when you watch this story, you know Kaos’s version of Orpheus and Eurydice, did you feel like it just misrepresented that story to you?
Claire Bushey
Yeah, basically. It’s like if you’re going to fuck with the Greek myths, you better be prepared to bring it. And I just don’t think that the story that I was given in place of the stories that exist did not feel satisfying to me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
I would love to expand on this question of why we love Greek god stories and what this show reminds us we love about it. Different from both of you, I turn to the Greek God stories, as in kind of a nostalgic way, in that my, as you can tell from my last name, I’m half Greek, and so I went to Greek school as a kid. And every Tuesday afternoon I, like, went to my nearby Greek Orthodox church. And we did plays in Greek of the Greek myths. And I was Hestia once. And, you know, I was Dionysus once. And, you know, in high school I climbed Mount Olympus. I don’t have an encyclopedic or intellectual sort of knowledge of the stories, but I feel like I have a sense of the gods as people like as characters or old friends or something.
And so I found when I was with them in this show that it was kind of fun to reimagine Dionysus as like a club boy, sort of who’s like always sort of clubbing at night or Poseidon as sort of like a billionaire living on a sort of superyacht. So I found that kind of fun. And I also found this sort of Easter egg hunt of pausing the show to look up, wait, who’s Daedalus again? Wait, what’s the story of Theseus? Also kind of a fun energy. So I sort of when I was watching it, I guess I expected less from it. I just sort of enjoyed their company and I’m wondering what you both got from it?
Claire Bushey
I mean, I absolutely enjoyed seeing like, OK, how are they going to do the contemporary update? Like, I liked the Furies as a motorcycle gang. I thought that worked.
Josh Spero
I thought that was great.
Claire Bushey
I liked Cerberus, the three-headed dog monster. Instead you have, like these, what looked like a three-headed greyhound that are like the dogs in airports that come up and sniff your bags to see whether you have drugs. So.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right.
Josh Spero
I think that there’s plenty of room for interpreting these figures in all sorts of different ways. And, you know, there’s definitely a nostalgic route to it. But also, when you look at some of the Greek tragedies, these characters act in very different ways in different plays by different authors. And so there, you can, as I said, you can be extremely flexible with them and you can develop it in a way that kind of suits you. For example, I think it was actually Euripides who first had Medea kill her children. So spoiler alert if you’ve never seen Medea. But she, in Greek myth before that in the, you know, the collected body of myth that circulated around the Aegean, it wasn’t Medea who did kill them.
So there is absolutely nothing wrong with making these people club kids or whatever. Like, these are really interesting ways of bringing them out. And I think they can be made relevant to every generation. And actually, one of my biggest problems with the whole thing was that it just tried to shoehorn relevance in. Like, it dealt with many really important issues like authoritarianism, terrorism, religious conflict, migration, how we treat outsiders, which are all, I mean, extremely important issues in the classical world anyway. But it just did it in such a ham-fisted, heavy-handed way where it was like, oh no, these people, these are the Trojans. Let’s go do a raid on Troy Town and see what those scum are up to. And it was like, OK, you’re labour-, you know, you’re labouring the point somewhat. Like, the audience aren’t entirely idiots.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
So I want to ask both of you for the sort of final part of our conversation about the kind of upsides and pitfalls of taking on the Greek myths, and whether it’s similar or different to remaking, say, a Shakespeare play or a Jane Austen adaptation. And I was thinking about how modern retellings of Greek mythology are very popular right now, but mostly in books. Right? There’s a lot of new novels, feminist retellings of stories, et cetera. There is also Hadestown, the Broadway hit, which is excellent. The retellings for Shakespeare and Jane Austen in TV and film can be as modern as something like Clueless or Bridget Jones or The Lion King, or Ten Things I Hate About You.
Josh Spero
Fire Island.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Or Fire Island, exactly. But with Greek mythology, it has to be a little more literal, or it’s often sort of set in the time, like Clash of the Titans or Troy or 300 or that sort of thing. And I’ve been trying to figure out why and where I’ve landed and tell me if you think I’m right or wrong. It’s just that, like the themes for Shakespeare and Jane Austen are pretty universal. It can be like, I love a man I can’t be with, or I hate my dad or whatever. And Greek mythology is just so like, the gods are relatable because they can be like us, but the stories are more kind of batshit crazy, like Hera turns Zeus’ lover into a cow.
Josh Spero
Yeah, but who hasn’t had a boyfriend that they wanted to turn into a cow? I’m very on board with that. I think, as Claire said, I was very moved by what you said earlier, Claire, about how you identified with Orpheus and Eurydice. Like, I think those things really do speak to us, but it’s just the intelligence of the way that it’s done or interpreted. I mean, I’ve seen so many different versions. I’ve seen films, I’ve read different books. Like, one of the best adaptations — wasn’t even an adaptation — is the retelling of the myth of Cassandra, who the Trojan prophetess who was never believed. And it’s by Christa Wulf. She was an East German novelist, and she wrote about, she just literally retold the Trojan war from Cassandra’s perspective. But the Trojans and the Greeks were really the Americans and the Russians in the cold war. And it spoke beautifully to the time. It really kind of conveyed her feelings about it.
So I think these things are, it’s all in the intelligence, the skill of the person who’s doing it. It’s incredibly flexible material. You know, it’s like, graphene or something, or Silly Putty or whatever it is. You can pull it and pull it and pull it, and it’s not going to break if you do it in a really great way. We all agree that I think pacing is one of the biggest problems. And I’m sure part of that is like Netflix going, quick, you know, get in with a bang, whereas things sometimes need subtlety.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. Claire, what do you think?
Claire Bushey
Yeah, I agree with what Josh was saying. Like, yes, it is fully possible to do this well. As you know, as chance would have it, I also spent this weekend reading Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s retelling of the Trojan war.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, she also wrote Circe. Right?
Claire Bushey
Yes, yes. And, you know, in her retelling, the gods are terrifying because they have all the power and they don’t care about humans at all. And you feel like the heroes are going to escape their fate right up until the instant that they don’t. Which is why I was like, you know, sobbing into my rosé in public in a Chicago bar over the weekend. So it’s like it can be deeply affecting. And, I don’t know, it feels like black comedy kind of should have worked for this better than it did, but I felt like the depth of feeling that is there was not fully explored because sometimes I would feel like, oh, like they want me to care about these two people who are falling in love, or they want me to be excited that someone is defying the gods. And it’s just like you didn’t earn it in any way.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
Can I ask both of you as my last question, so what would you, what did it make you itch for? Like, what did this show, it clearly didn’t give you what you wanted. If you were to remake the show or if you were to make a modern retelling of Greek mythology, what did it make you want? What did you want to see?
Josh Spero
I mean, migration is obviously a gigantic story, a gigantic topic for the world today. And The Trojan Women, the Euripides play about the forced deportation of these women from Troy, that they’re being taken back to Greece as prisoners after the end of the Trojan war, you know, that story is absolutely, it is not just eternal, it’s also extremely relevant now. There was, a production called The Trojan Women Project a few years ago which used female Syrian refugees to retell it. Like that sort of thing, you know, is urgently needed because that will, you know, that reaches huge numbers of people and it uses the myth in a way that is just so of the moment. And, you know, I, I think more things like that, but also like I want stupid stuff. Like if they did an Arrested Development version of the Greek myths, I’d be totally down for that.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally. What about you, Claire?
Claire Bushey
Well, you know how people will say, like, oh, this meeting should have been an email?
Josh Spero
(laughter) This film should have been a TikTok.
Claire Bushey
(laughter) I mean, you know, I feel like the TV show, maybe it would have worked better as, like, a comic book. Just something that would have forced them to explain the plot a little bit more that makes sense within the, like, internal framework of the rules of the universe that they set up. And so I feel like maybe if they handled that a little bit better, I would have been sufficiently engaged to want a sequel.
Josh Spero
Oh, you know what they could do, like they’ve done with Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, they could do a prequel and then they could explain all of this. It is a prequel series that’s like . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m sure you would love . . .
Josh Spero
I mean, you could build up, you could see how, I don’t know, Orpheus and Eurydice met on Tinder or something.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Right, right right right right, right. You know, it made me sort of want actually the, like, Schoolhouse Rock of all of these myths or like, the Hamilton version, like making history fun. I kind of wanted, like, a show where every episode was a different myth that I remember vaguely from school that was vaguely modern and fun.
Josh Spero
Yeah. Or like an anthology series or something. But yeah, it’s the ADHD of Greek myths.
Lilah Raptopoulos
And on that savage final note, I want to thank you both for being on the show. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less.
[FT WEEKEND FESTIVAL ADVERTISEMENT PLAYING]
Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome back for More or Less, where each guest says one thing they want to see more of or less of culturally. Josh, what do you have?
Josh Spero
So last weekend I reviewed two of the BBC Proms, which is a series of classical music concerts held every summer. There are about 80 of them. And I saw the Berlin Philharmonic, which is one of the best orchestras in the world, and they played Bruckner, a composer I normally dislike, and it was transcendentally wonderful. So I’m going to say more Bruckner Symphony.
Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Josh, can you explain who Bruckner was for me and maybe Claire and listeners, other listeners who are less cultured?
Josh Spero
So Anton Bruckner was a 19th century composer who is celebrating his 200th birthday this year. And he wrote a number of extremely monumental and weird symphonies, as well as some really wonderful choral music. And he’s having a big, he’s had a big revival in the past 50 years because people are getting to grips with how weird he is.
Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s incredible. OK. We will put some links in the show notes. Claire, what about you?
Claire Bushey
So we just had the Labor Day holiday in the US, which marks the traditional end of summer. And it just had me thinking about, you know, about the labour movement and how critical it has been for advancing people’s wellbeing at work. And so when I’m thinking about what I want more of, I want to see more organising, more unions and more contracts.
Lilah Raptopoulos
I love that. OK. Mine’s a little bit related in that this Labor Day weekend, I went to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And so my more technically is more embracing the tourist in you, like, less pretending that you’re cooler than the touristy things in your hometown and going to actually see them. The reason I went is because I see the Statue of Liberty every day from where I live. And my partner and I love her, but neither of us had been. So we went and it was really great. But the thing that I realise is that when you go to the touristy things in your town, it’s actually better sometimes if you’re a resident of that town, because, like, half of the Ellis Island Museum was about New York. So as a New Yorker, it was even more interesting than it would have been for a random tourist. And a lot of the museum was also about the labour movements in New York. And that felt relevant to Labor Day. That’s my more. More going up the, you know, Empire State Building.
Josh Spero
Now I would totally watch Statue of Liberty starring in a sci-fi series ala-Marvel.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Are you listening Netflix? Claire and Josh, thank you both so much for coming on the show. This is a real delight.
Claire Bushey
Thank you for having us.
Josh Spero
Yeah, it’s been great.
Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a look through our show notes. You will find links to everything mentioned today, as well as a discount to a subscription to the Financial Times and places to reach me on email and on Instagram, where I love chatting with you all about culture. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s our incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and Cheryl Brumley is our global head of audio. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.
