KAOS: How Netflix’s Short-Term Thinking Kills Storytelling

By Javier Rovira

What is innovation worth in the eyes of the corporate specter? Why invest in something that can fail when you can make another reboot or dump money into another season of a mediocre show? Those questions are the backbone of the film industry in the modern day. On the 29th of August 2024, the new Netflix Original series "KAOS" was released in the United States, it was born into the world with little fanfare or promotion, being thrown out into the endless stream of media entering and leaving the machine that is the Streaming Giant. The series was a modern retelling of many Ancient Greek myths in the modern age, connecting each mythological tale into a modern and fresh mythology. The series built a new world using what are the archetypes of Gods and Heroes to tell their own great adventure. The short series focuses on various characters as they navigate their way through their lives and afterlives while dealing with a prophecy that would end the reign of the Gods. It emphasizes the role of the people in the fight against oppression and corruption and how the very Gods giving in to their vices led them to their destruction.

The show combines the stories of Orpheus and Euridice, the Minitour, and parts of the Troyan war to tell the story of the fall of the gods. The show takes place in a "modern" Krete, ruled by the will of Zeus. The show begins with Zeus fearing that he's aging and takes it as a sign that his prophecy is coming to fruition: a prophecy that would mean the end of his rule. While he tries to secure his power by intimidating mortals and controlling the other gods into fearing him, his son Dionysus falls in. love with humanity. He begins secretly aiding the mortal Orpheus to bring back his lover Eurydice, called Riddy in the show, from the dead. In the Underworld, a worker named Caeneus befriends Euridice, and together, they discover a plot occurring in the land of the dead. On the other side of the story, the daughter of President Minos, Ariadne, discovers family secrets and looks to right the wrongs that have been dealt to the Troyan citizens. The story is narrated by Prometheus, who tells the audience that all these humans have a role in the fall of the tyrannical Gods. That soon it would be their time to bring them down. With eight 50-minute-long episodes, the drama series ends on a cliffhanger, leaving the audience ready for the mystery to continue to unfold.

While this series may have its faults, it is a good dark drama and mystery that feels like everything is a puzzle coming together. There were various moments where I was pleasantly surprised at the way that they switched up the original myths not only to serve a modern audience but to serve the story they were telling, specifically the fact that they made Eurydice into the more focal of the two characters was something very surprising and rather interesting as other modern interpretations, most notably the critically acclaimed Broadway Musical Hadestown, add more strength to Euridice as a character but still focus considerably more on Orpheus as the main hero. That and the addition of the gods not being divine from birth rather than by force make the show incredibly refreshing from the point of view of the modern reimagining of Greek myths. It appears many critics agree, as it received generally good reviews in both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. As the reception seemed to be doing well and the series ended in a cliffhanger where all the characters were put in place to begin the destruction of the gods, it seemed reasonable to assume that the series would get a season 2, but that assumption would be proven gravely wrong. On the 8th of October 2024, not even two months after its release, Netflix announced that the show would be canceled and would not be getting a second season. The announcement was shocking to many, but it should have been expected. Netflix is a company that has regulated its shows through its initial success, and "KAOS" reached only 3.4 million people during its launch week, later totalling 14.9 million before cancellation, peaking at the top 3 on Netflix's top 10 list.

The cancellation of "KAOS" marks the continuation of a worrying trend of Netflix canceling shows if they don't meet their immediate standards, pushing away anything that could be new and innovative for the sake of short-term monetary success. We have reached a point in time where the streaming model has effectively become the same as the cable programming that preceded it. Corporate giants such as Netflix and Disney have begun price gauging, pushing up their prices while getting rid of hundreds of programs that people used to watch. Streaming began as a way for people to watch shows at any time; the pioneering giant in this field was Netflix, which had been the first service of its kind that allowed you to "binge" all your favorite shows and stories as you pleased. The streaming model proved to be such a huge success that it began to overtake traditional cable TV, and it allowed Netflix to take a big gamble in making its own original show.

The first show, which was released as a Netflix original, was "House of Cards", released on the 1st of February, 2013, and costing the company 100 million dollars. This was a big gamble for the company, but it was one that had been thoughtfully calculated. Netflix had spent years cataloging what their subscription base was most interested in and ensured that the "House of Cards" would be a success. The show had been a remake of a previously beloved British version, a strategy that had worked wonders for "The Office," one of Netflix's most-watched series, and it had been a drama series, which made it incredibly suitable for the "binging" model which the platform had made, keeping viewer's always wanting to watch more. After its release, the series was critically acclaimed and quickly became a cultural phenomenon, drawing millions of viewers and setting a new standard for streaming content. The show's success proved that Netflix's data-driven approach could guide high-stakes decisions and led to a wave of other original content, reshaping the entertainment industry. It marked the beginning of Netflix's transformation from a content distributor to a major player in content creation, paving the way for a future filled with award-winning shows and movies.

Why does this matter to the story of "KAOS"? Well, it shows us the beginnings of Netflix's business cycle. They had manually engineered success and started out by making shows and movies tied to their analytical nature of what would sell. While its first few programs had been largely well-written, performed, and in some cases critically acclaimed, after a while, they shifted away from that system and looked forward to what they knew would work and would be relatively cheap to produce. This shift is what led to the creation of the plethora of reality TV, or quick entertainment low-cost shows like "Love is Blind" and "Is it Cake?" that flood the service now. These shows are cheap and fast to produce, but most importantly, people can put them on with no problem. Shows like "KAOS" or "Inside Job," which have been picked up and dropped by Netflix after a single season, didn't provide instant results, so they were not able to have the same shelf life as shows like "Emily in Paris." Time is money for people, and Netflix has become

the same as every other service that used to dominate cable, making shows that can pander to large audiences that want to put something in the background and forget about the troubles of the world. Media that like "KAOS" can take time to find its audience, but time is the greatest asset that services do not wish to waste, and if the short-term engagement of a show isn't high, then the show wasn't worth anything, to begin with, and you better cancel it before it can make you lose more money. The time that was awarded by cable reruns is now gone, and what made people able to create cult classics is now a thing of the past.

While "KAOS" might not have been the greatest show of all time, it was a show that clearly showed passion and dedication. It looked to tell a story that was evidently human and creative; it was a show that deserved to be so much more than what it was allowed to be. There was potential for this show to have become a cult classic if it wasn't for Netflix burning off its wings like Icarus and watching it fall to its demise. Now, it lays as just another show in the pile of unfinished one-season stories that were not given that extra support by the company that had made it. Would "Stranger Things" have been one of these if it hadn't done well fast enough? Could we have lived in a world where "Narcos" or "Bridgerton" or "BoJack Horsemen" would have been canceled in return for another season of "Is It Cake?" or "Emily in Paris" if they hadn't performed well enough in its first month? Worryingly, we live in an age where progressively creative risk isn't seen as viable, and we have stopped seeing companies investing in new ideas in favor of remakes and sequels, and that is a worrying future. It is important for people to be willing to invest in projects that might not seem right for them immediately and be willing to try something outside the box, or else companies will stop trying new things and we’ll lose out on so many creative and unique stories that are out there ready to be told. So check “KAOS” out and see if you are one of the people that would have liked to see this story continue