Kaleidoscope, Netflix’s new heist series staring Giancarlo Esposito, gives every viewer their own unique random episode order, but neither the gimmick nor the series are interesting enough to care.
It’s tempting to believe a great heist story, whether it’s in a movie or a series, is like great jazz: A collection of seemingly disparate parts, each excellent but incomplete on their own, get combined together to create something transcendent. At least, that’s the hope behind Netflix’s new heist series Kaleidoscope, which gives each viewer a randomized episode order. 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.
Kaleidoscope, created by Eric Garcia (Repo Men), follows Leo Pap (Giancarlo Esposito, who seems to pick a new voice at random at the start of each episode), a former thief looking to return to the life for one last job.
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. 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 (Jordan Mendoza), and Bob Goodwin I’d describe the characters more, but the show doesn’t bother, so why should I.
But again, the order you learn about any of this is mostly up in the air. You might start with an introduction to the crew, or just to Leo. You could get a preliminary heist as your midpoint, or you could get several episodes worth of flashbacks about Leo and his former partner, or the stunningly incompetent FBI agent who’s chasing him and his crew. Even when the show is layering on extraneous details in these episodes, they really only amount to relationship drama between two or more members of the crew. 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.
One somewhat interesting note about the randomization, though, is that there do seem to be a few limits on which episodes can appear where, and everyone ends with the same two, the heist and its aftermath.
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.
