Kudos to Netflix for commissioning it in the first place and letting all that strangeness play out in style, but the streamer had to know that it didn’t have another Virgin River on its hands here. Requiring it to get the ratings of one to survive into a second season was dooming it to fail. KAOS was both niche and expensive: two things that Netflix shows now struggle to be.
As British screenwriter Sophie Petzal (Blood, Hollington Drive) wrote on X in a discussion about the KAOS cancellation: “What needs to be more widely understood is this is about the unsustainable budgets that have been part of the streaming conquest the last decade. The shows being cancelled were greenlit in a different age/economy. The bar for success at this price point is unreachable.”
It wasn’t always like this. In 2018, the year that KAOS was commissioned, Netflix bosses boasted of spending $8 billion (roughly a dollar for every person on the planet) on 700 original shows. It was a bonanza. In the subscriber model, huge hits would support fringe titles, and the race was on to have both the biggest and broadest slate possible. Between 2017 – 2019, Netflix signed big-money multi-year overall deals with producers Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, Game of Thrones’ DB Weiss and David Benioff and more. They commissioned like crazy. Other streamers competed and the era of #toomuchtelevision was upon us.
Then came 2020 and the Covid pandemic shutdowns and their knock-on global economic effect. After that came the (necessary) WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Many of those creator overall deals have now run their course, advertising revenue – for those it affects – has dropped significantly, new commissions have been stripped back, and here we are, in different, straitened times.
Streamers are still commissioning and renewing shows of course. In the last 24 hours, Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This and thriller The Diplomat were announced as getting new seasons. They just announced another Pride & Prejudice TV adaptation. What’s being commissioned now are established mainstream successes with accessibly broad appeal. KAOS is not that. After similarly early cancellations for The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself, Lockwood & Co, 1899 and more on Netflix, we can’t be surprised that it also wasn’t given a second season.
KAOS was a vestige of the streaming goldrush. It sat on Netflix under a “Coming Soon” placeholder for five years with a strapline promising “a modern twist on Greek and Roman mythology, exploring themes of gender politics, power and life in the underworld”. With every passing year since it was commissioned (initially for 10 episodes, later shortened to eight), it began to feel less and less likely that it would be made at all.