¡Maldita lisiada! KAOS Is a Telenovela in Disguise

Growing up, I would sit on my mom's bed while she folded her clothes, and just absorb dangerous amounts of Mexican melodrama on a daily basis. We would watch different telenovelas, sampling a bit here and there from different channels. I would leave the room during the steamy scenes and come back for the domestic violence ones. The seed was planted early. Even when my horizons broadened, the telenovela blueprint was buried deep inside my narrative DNA. Love, betrayal, secret families, accidents, love again, fate bringing people together against everything, or pushing them apart forever.

Years later, I saw that Kurt Vonnegut graph about the shapes of stories. Basically, good fortune turns to bad fortune over time, and viceversa, and you can chart the narrative arcs with specific shapes. He gives a few examples: man in hole story, Cinderella story, the Old Testament.

If you tried to plot a Mexican telenovela using Vonnegut’s method, the chart would break. It would loop, spike, nosedive, rise again, explode. Take the telenovela Rubí, for instance. Just the highlights:

• Beautiful and broke, Rubí sets her sights on a rich, handsome man who can buy her the life of luxury she craves.
• While her best friend plans her dream wedding, Rubí snakes her way into the groom’s office, seduces him with a fake romance, and ruins everything.
• After getting hit by a car while saving her niece, Rubí suffers a miscarriage. But she frames her husband for abuse until he uncovers the truth and dies in a dramatic car crash en route to clear his name.
• Rubí runs after the guy she loves/hates, slips off a balcony, crashes face-first through a glass table, and loses her leg. She gets a gun and tries to stop the wedding.
• 18 years later, her niece grows up to look exactly like Rubí. She sends her niece to seduce the guy whose wedding she couldn't stop years before.

That’s not a plotline. If you graphed Rubí, you might find the secret name of God.

All of this is to say: I was trained from childhood to recognize a specific flavor of narrative excess. Even when I stopped watching telenovelas, I never stopped craving that emotional scale. That mythic extra. I just needed a more respectable way to get it. Something “elevated.” Which brings me to KAOS.

KAOS is a Netflix series about Greek gods living in a decayed modern version of their mythical world. On paper, it’s prestige television with classical references. In reality, it’s a telenovela in disguise.

The show splits its time between Olympus (toxic divine royalty), Earth (political drama and prophecy), and the Underworld (literally and emotionally dead people trying to escape). Zeus is paranoid, power-hungry, and obsessed with control. His wife/sister Hera is sleeping with his brother Poseidon.

On Earth, we meet Ari, daughter of President Minos, a man who keeps a literal Minotaur in a literal Labyrinth. Ari is fighting a prophecy and discovering that her family’s power is built on systemic oppression of the Trojans, as the show takes place a few years after the Trojan War. Now, the Trojans live in ghettos and are second-class citizens.

The last story follows Eurydice (they call her Riddy most of the time) after she's hit by a bus right before she gets the courage to tell her husband Orpheus she doesn't love him anymore. She goes to the Underworld and uncovers a bureaucratic nightmare of soul trafficking. Her husband Orpheus dares to cross into the land of the dead to get her back.

Finally, everything is narrated by Prometheus. Even though he's forever chained to a rock with his guts hanging out, he's pulling the strings and plotting against Zeus.

KAOS is loud, uneven, and addictive. I didn’t love it at first, but I couldn’t stop watching. The acting is huge. The music changes every thirty seconds. The tone swings without warning. It’s messy. It’s mythic. It’s melodramatic. And that’s when it hit me.

KAOS is a telenovela.

All the signs were there: moral polarity, fated lovers, divine betrayals, character archetypes. Myth and telenovelas have always shared narrative blood. Characters don’t behave realistically, they behave symbolically. Archetypes take over.

In KAOS, Zeus is the Evil Patriarch: manipulative, omnipotent, emotionally fragile. Riddy is the Suffering Heroine: pure-hearted, tragically misunderstood, betrayed by the one who was supposed to protect her. Hera is the Wicked and Dignified Stepmother having an affair. It’s not that the show is borrowing from telenovelas, it’s that both telenovelas and myths are borrowing from the same well.

And, of course, what is myth without disproportionate, cruel punishment? Sisyphus forever rolling a boulder uphill only to have it roll back down. Tantalus surrounded by fruits and water, but unable to reach either, hungry and thirsty forever. Telenovelas have an answer for that. Every transgression is punished: you might get eaten by wolves, be burned alive, disfigured, end up in jail paying for protection for the rest of your life.

They both love fate. They both worship drama. They both use repetition to create. In telenovelas, the story beats are always the same: betrayal, discovery, revenge, forgiveness, betrayal again. In mythology, the cycles are eternal: death and rebirth, hubris and fall, curse and purification. You know what's goign to happen, all you’re wondering is how big it’s going to be this time.

And KAOS goes big. At one point, Zeus burns Hera’s bees. The bees, it turns out, are actually the human mothers of Zeus’ many illegitimate children. That is peak villain behaviour: the kind of symbolic escalation only telenovelas and gods dare to attempt, and petty exploits a good telenovela villain exhibits.

Of course, KAOS doesn’t market itself this way. It wants to be seen as high-concept satire. An allegory about power and patriarchy. And it is, but it’s also deeply unserious in the best way possible. There's a balance between black comedy and deep, serious moments (never too serious) that keep the show light and engaging.

All these memories of telenovelas kept coming back to me as I devoured episode after episode of KAOS. After watching the last episode, I looked up when the new episodes were coming out. Which is why it’s so tragic that Netflix cancelled it after just one season. It premiered August 29th, 2024. By October 6th, it was dead. Even though it made the Top 10 chart for four weeks, even though it peaked at #3, that wasn’t enough. Netflix wanted instant mass engagement. And when the world didn’t binge KAOS, the fates cut the thread.

As things got extremely complicated and convoluted, I would ask my mom to explain what was going on, why the heroine was in a coma and how was her evil sister able to take her place. My mom would wait until the commercial break and try to explain it without going into too much detail about all the romantic things I didn't get. KAOS wasn’t just a show I liked. It scratched a narrative itch I didn’t even know I had.