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?”

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.

New Netflix drama Kaleidoscope arrives will plenty of hype around it because of its unique concept - but just how does the non-linear series work?

For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the [Radio Times View From My Sofa podcast](https://www.radiotimes.com/audio/podcasts/). [Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month](https://www.netflix.com/gb/). After Hurricane Sandy, $70 billion in unregistered bearer bonds were flooded and lost. How did the crew of thieves plan it? They've then been jumbled up so it all becomes a mystery of just how the heist took place, a secret which is finally revealed at the end. Who can be trusted?" Who gets away with it? - Red - The morning after the heist - White - The heist - Orange - 3 weeks before the heist - Yellow - 6 weeks before the heist - Violet - 24 years before the 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.

It is a concept that Black Mirror would've killed for. Taking place over 25 years, the eight episodes of Kaleidoscope will arrive in each Netflix account in a ...

Each episode does contain its own little centrepiece to hold our attention, be it a smaller heist (to fund the big one), a shoot-out, a double-cross, a prison break, what have you. So, yeah, a bit of a mixed bag. While we can certainly see how that might be the case, unfortunately at its core we've got a pretty run-of-the-mill revenge-heist plot. It is a concept that Black Mirror would've killed for. So those first seven episodes can be viewed in It's aiming for Ocean's 11, but we get Ocean's 6...

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.

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.

The stars of Netflix's new heist series talk about how the show makes the viewing experience personal.

“It’s harder to execute than just being able to cut things in a different order and feed it to the viewer,” Jai Courtney, who plays Bob Goodwin in Kaleidoscope, tells Inverse. “I think it's going to force writers to get better at what they do, to think through the whole story at one time, to be able to build all the building blocks that Eric Garcia has done so magnificently in Kaleidoscope.” These colors make up a different “kaleidoscope” for each viewer, leading up to the finale, “White.” Every episode has to serve as an introduction to each character and the struggles they face. It’s an entirely new way of telling a story, and something that was especially exciting to the cast. Even the thumbnail that appears on the screen for each of those suggestions is changed according to your interests.