Kaleidoscope Netflix

With 'Kaleidoscope,' Netflix is trying to take advantage of the streaming model, but stumbles with the follow-through.

They are certainly exciting, but after seven episodes of build-up — including two that take place after the events of the heist — it’s not enough of a reward for the emotional investment viewers put into these characters. How enticing could the heist be if the viewers know how it all ends? There are plot points that “click” together like the jigsaw of the working title, but it’s often more of an “oh, I see,” than an “a-ha!” moment. But while the format is intriguing, it’s not the case for another upheaval of how we watch TV. While the first seven episodes appear in different orders, the finale will always be a finale, ridding the show of the insurmountable problem of ending on a bang no matter the order. Suddenly, appointment television was a thing of the past and water cooler conversations started with, “Have you finished it yet?”

Netflix's heist drama 'Kaleidoscope,' starring Giancarlo Esposito, is designed so viewers can watch the episodes in any order.

I can only speak to the one I went with. All of which means it’s impossible for me to guess what might count as a “spoiler” to anyone else.) At least “Yellow,” set six weeks before the crime, turned out to be as good a place for me to start watching the series as any. It wasn’t until I’d gulped down the whole season that I realized that, no, the person at its center was simply never granted an inner life to begin with. Used well, a time-hopping structure can tease big twists, offer conflicting perspectives, bring us closer to a character’s inner turmoil or draw out thematic parallels between past and present. Also in classic heist-thriller fashion, the fun lies in watching these clashing personalities bond or butt heads or cast suspicion on one another as their talents click together to accomplish the unimaginable. The main advantage of its unorthodox structure is that it helps obscure how generic some of its component pieces really are. If I’m doing the math correctly, there are over 5,000 possible ways to get through the season if you follow Netflix’s half-hearted assertion that “White,” the installment covering the heist itself, is intended as the finale — or over 40,000 if you decide to chuck that suggestion out the window. Gimmick aside, the installments actually lend themselves to a fairly straightforward linear progression. Whether it actually enhances the narrative, however, is another question entirely, and one with a rather less inspiring answer. My colleague Dan Fienberg recently penned a screed against the Depending on the path you take, you’ll have a different perspective on what the show’s deepest mysteries are, which characters seem sympathetic or villainous, and whether certain beats play as setup or payoff.

Seven of the eight episodes of the new heist series can be watched in any order. Giancarlo Esposito leads the cast.

Kaleidoscope is a pretty straightforward heist drama presented in a way that allows you to pick and choose which way you want to take in the story. Thanks mostly to the presence of Giancarlo Esposito, it’s a drama that’s worth watching, whether you just go down the list of episodes in whichever order it’s listed or pick episodes at random. His motivation to escape, as well as his motivation to do the “last big heist” are all predicated on his desire to patch things up with Hannah, and to get back at Salas. When she and the cop she’s with leave Ava’s house, the cop says, “You need to get your shit together.” Hmm… Our Take: Eric Garcia has said in interviews that the idea of watching the first seven episodes of Kaleidoscope in any order forced him and his writing team to ensure that the episodes are more like anthology episodes than a continuing storyline. Sleeper Star: Richard Masur plays the doctor in the Green episode, and as always, the character actor stands out even though he’s only in a few scenes. The differences here is that the episodes are a bit less open-ended, and you can watch those side trips at whatever point you wish. We do think he’s succeeded there; when we popped up the “Yellow” episode, which takes six days before the heist, we see Ray — now Leo — gathering his team to rob a vault Salas is protecting for “The Triplets”, three billionaire industrialists. [Matchstick Men](https://decider.com/movie/matchstick-men/)) is a heist drama that is designed so that the viewer can watch seven of its eight episodes in any order. Will some episodes veer into deep in the past or deep in the future? He wants Stan to come with him, but Stan demurs at first; he is getting out in six months and wants to marry Judy. Ray (Giancarlo Esposito) has been in prison in upstate New York for 17 years, and he’s constantly trying to write a letter to his daughter Hannah Kim (Tati Gabrielle), who he stopped seeing early in his prison term.

Giancarlo Esposito stars in the drama, out January 1, whose episodes viewers can watch in any order.

The show’s attempts to convey the texture of these characters’ relationships in quick ways that wouldn’t jar viewers who’d already been spending time with them didn’t consistently land, and the stakes seemed at once huge — the players were in the midst of a web of crime and confusing loyalties — and nonexistent. But it reminded me, a bit, of the George Perec novel translated into English as “A Void,” one that in French and English both is written without using the letter “E.” It’s a clever stunt, but do readers today remember the story, or simply the fact of its constraints? The issue with “Kaleidoscope,” though, is that its design is less an ingenious way of moving storytelling forward than the sort of thing a creator, or a streamer, does because it can.

Kaleidoscope arrives on Netflix on Sunday (1 January) with its unusual premise prompting raised eyebrows and questions from many viewers. The crime drama – ...

“What is the best order to watch Kaleidoscope?” questioned one viewer on Twitter. Netflix states that the “order in which [viewers] watch the episodes will affect their viewpoint on the story, the characters, and the questions and answers at the heart of the heist”. It follows a group of masterful thieves, led by Breaking Bad star [Giancarlo Esposito](/topic/giancarlo-esposito), who work together to pull off an elaborate heist.

To pull off the job, Leo gets together a crew that includes Ava Mercer (Paz Vega), Judy Goodwin (Rosaline Elbay), Stan Loomis (Peter Mark Kendall), RJ Acosta ( ...

It feels like the intended effect of Netflix randomizing Kaleidoscope’s episodes was to compel friends to urge each other to continue the show so they can reach the next big episode or moment. Even the heist itself, which has an hour devoted to it but still mostly manages to be about walking from one place to the next, can’t find a way to be exciting or slick. And nothing about the show or its characters has even the ounce of the charm it would take to make following them through this byzantine shuffle of episodes anything other than a drag. Kaleidoscope’s pacing feels nonsensical, which might seem like it’s the obvious fault of the random order. None of these glaring issues can be attributed to the randomized order. It relies on characters who know more than we do, who hold back the ace up their sleeve, obscured from even the audience, for just the perfect hand. Rather than any kind of actual personality for the characters or anything else that might make you care about them, we get first-day-of-class fun facts like one character liking the play the drums or another wanting to retire to the beach. Just like a great heist, a great heist movie requires perfect timing, giving out character reveals at just the right moment, knowing when the story needs a new complication, and throwing shocking twists in at exactly the right moment for maximum audience impact. Depending on the order of your episodes, when we meet Leo he’s either about to break out of prison, or he’s dead set on revenge via the biggest job he can think of: hitting his former partner who now runs a security company with a high-tech underground vault. Meanwhile, every side character just seems like more trouble than they’re worth, with most of them feeling like they’re at best one Google search smarter than the audience about everything from safe cracking to explosives. Unfortunately, the show never really makes a song worth listening to, and mostly feels like a din of out-of-tune instruments, no matter what order they’re in. While this format is almost interesting at first blush, its problems become clear with a little more thought: There’s nothing fundamentally interesting about learning things in a random order.

In the new drama starring Giancarlo Esposito, the first seven episodes work however you shuffle them. But that success comes at a price.

Aside from that bit of chromatic signifying, “Kaleidoscope” has a flattened aesthetic that robs the show a little bit of the time-hopping fun. Garcia and the team have enough misdirects up their sleeve that there are some fun surprises along the way, even if some of them are telegraphed. Some of that comes from what Leo and the team are going for. And this isn’t even the best crime drama in the last five years to have a non-chronological timeline with color-themed episodes, fractal-based end credits, and a supporting performance from Esposito where he plays someone with a complicated relationship to a safe-cracker. To the show’s credit, there are others that are slid in more subtly (including one of the series’ most effective twists that happens entirely off-screen). In practice, the show is more like a safe with a pinpad code with each episode giving you a number to unlock the whole thing. Part of that stems from the idea that the show is, by design, vague about who all these people are and what drives them. The show is being billed as a puzzle, where every episode is a piece. Each episode is color-coded, offering any audience member a time-fragmented look at the lead-up to and the aftermath of the planned robbery. “Kaleidoscope” could easily have taken the same tack and built 45-minute chunks around each person involved in the job. Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell), a hotshot security magnate who claims to have one of the most protected private storage areas in the world. It’s a simple enough premise, key considering a high-concept storyline probably wouldn’t mesh well with the episode shuffling and flexibility that this format needs.

Netflix's new heist miniseries "Kaleidoscope" can be watched in any order. Here's how to watch the eight episodes in chronological order.

This took place over a period of time, so the story gets told over a period of time, and you get to see how the heist affected each person who took part in it. “After Hurricane Sandy, $70 billion worth of bonds got flooded in the basement of the DTCC, which is a large clearing effort that’s owned by a bunch of the big banks. “Everyone loves to try to figure out what the heist is going to be and how it’s going to take place, and when you have an opportunity to do that in a movie, you sort of have just one trajectory,” he said. “There were days definitely in the way that we shot it that I had moments of total confusion into where the fuck we were in the story.” Here’s how to watch the Kaleidoscope episodes in chronological order, culminating with the “White” episode. “The idea is that when you watch the white episode, you’re learning true answers to things that have been hinted about beforehand and afterward.

Netflix's new heist series, "Kaleidoscope," will premiere on January 1. Here's everything we know about if Kaleidoscope is based on a true story.

On December 13, Netflix officially premiered the trailer for the series with the description, "There are 7 billion ways to solve a crime. [Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/80992058), the streamer will build "intrigue and suspense" by granting members access to different episodes at different times. Kaleidoscope is a star-studded series loosely based on an IRL heist that took place in New York.

Non-linear Netflix heist thriller Kaleidoscope was inspired by true events...or events that could have hypothetically been true.

This means the story is somewhat of a non-factor without adding some zest to the alchemy. There is still negligible evidence to this day about the whereabouts of the cash. So how does this tie back to the events in the show? Kaleidoscope is the thrilling theoretical answer to some of these questions. After the devastating tropical storm that wrecked havoc on the East Coast of the United States a decade ago, about $70 billion in bonds in a vault deep underground were ruined by the fluids that inundated New York City. You know how it feels like virtually every piece of television or film has to have some sort of disclaimer in the news before its release saying “based on a true story”?