11/18/2023 0 Comments Kaleidoscope review 2023![]() ![]() Hoping for some backstory, my next episode was “Violet,” which Netflix’s episode descriptions indicated was set 24 years before the heist here, I stumbled on what may be the reason for all the sizzle and oddity of Netflix’s presentation of “Kaleidoscope.” The core product just isn’t very good. 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. (For similar reasons, it feels as though just about everything about this show could be construed as a spoiler - suffice it to say that Esposito’s character is on a mission not merely to win back money but affection, and to harm an enemy in the process.) And I found myself yearning for the simplicity of a classically built TV pilot when first watching “Red,” an episode that takes place the morning after the heist. Here, those constraints mean that every episode must be legible to viewers who are coming in cold: It could be their first one. 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? I suppose it’s novel enough to have a bunch of episodes available to watch in random order (although it’s not brand-new: The former CBS All Access launched in 2020 a series, “Interrogation,” built in a similar way). 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” has an interesting enough story at its center - the whirring of its random-episode design overlays a story of a daring heist undertaken as a sort of revenge by a master criminal ( Giancarlo Esposito) and his crack team. A perhaps gently hungover viewer may be coddled by the knowledge that viewing order doesn’t matter, and, for that matter, that pertinent information will be repeated as needed to make points clear. In this way, it seems to suggest itself in form as much as premiere date as ideal for a New Year’s Day binge. 1, is intended to be viewed in any order, with its first seven episodes possible to scramble and remix however the viewer chooses ahead of a final installment. Is Netflix really shuffling the episodes, and will things really play out all that differently if you watch them out of order? The short answer is “Yes.” And to prove it, I intentionally jumped around from the episode order I was presented so I could test Netflix’s proposition.The new series “ Kaleidoscope,” premiering on Jan. Some might think of this nonlinear structure as a gimmick, superficial trickery used to hook viewers and convince them to watch all the way to the end without suffering binge burnout. There are no episode numbers, with each installment instead paired with a color code: “Yellow,” “Pink,” “Orange,” “Blue,” “Green,” “Violet,” and “Red.” “White,” the series finale, is placed at the bottom of the order for every user Not only that, but each Netflix subscriber will have their episode order presented to them in a different sequence. ![]() See, Kaleidoscope is created so that its first seven episodes can be watched in any order. ![]() ![]() It’s a clever tactic, one that effectively builds on the show’s unique watch experience. There are vivid colors and hidden secrets everywhere you look, making each episode its own hypnotic guessing game. 1, is intentionally designed with shiny distractions that keep your eyes darting about. Netflix’s latest limited series, which launched Jan. Kaleidoscope, like its namesake explosion of fractals, has plenty of beautiful things to look at-and I don’t just mean Jai Courtney, one of the members of an elite heist team put together to break into a bank vault for the $7 billion score of a lifetime. ![]()
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