Kaleidoscope

I was really looking forward to watching this show. The trailer was appealing, it looked like Ocean's eleven meets Tarantino, so I binge-watched it as soon as it hit Netflix.

But unfortunately, due to the gimmicky "any order will do" structure, the tension doesn't build up, the script had to be "neutral" in every episode so as not to spoil the other ones, should you watch them in a different order than the default one listed on Netflix.

Bottom line, there's too many unnecessary episodes, lingering on back-stories that could have been wrapped up in a few minutes, and not enough about the heist itself. Many important details are rushed or simply overlooked, while other quite insignificant ones are explained in excruciating details.

I really hoped I'd be hooked and amazed. Didn't happen.

The gimmick of being able to watch the show in any order is fine on paper, but what does it actually accomplish? You're not going to watch it more than once and who really cares what order someone else watches the show in.

I don't mind non-linear storytelling and the show was perfectly watchable in the order I got it, but all in all there is very little payoff. I also figured out the twist quite early, because it's pretty obvious if you watch a specific episode early on so when I got the actual heist episode as the last one there was no surprise and it was pretty lackluster. Think about how Oceans Eleven would feel if the actual heist wasn't even interesting.

The cast does a decent job even though everyone is fairly one dimensional.

Overall it wasn't a terrible show, but you're not missing a whole lot if you decide to skip it.

Yes it could have been better. It's not perfect, but really what is. I watched over two nights in the order Netflix gave it me and I thought it was fine. If you need to watch it in chronological order, you'd missed the point. And those who say bad script, bad acting, bad direction blah blah. Tell you what, why not get off your couch and do better. Write something great, pitch it to Netflix. That's the problem with most couch critics, they love to trash everything, yet don't have an ounce of creative ability. Some shows deserve a bashing, because there is some absolute trash being made, but this isn't one of them. In my opinion...of course.

Despite this being a so called non-linear series (you can watch the episodes in any order and it still makes sense), I decided to watch them in chronological order and I'm glad I did.

If you would like to do the same, here is the episode order by timeline.

Violet - 24 years before the heist.

Green - 7 years before the heist.

Yellow - 6 weeks before the heist.

Orange - 3 weeks before the heist.

Blue - 5 days before the heist.

White - The heist.

Red - The morning after the heist.

Pink - 6 months after the heist.

The non-linear format : A nice idea but I would have been disappointed to end the series on certain episodes. Just my opinion though.

It's a gimmick to get you to buy the cereal, but once you get to the toy at the bottom of the box, it's just a cheap useless piece of plastic, and not worth buying the cereal you normally wouldn't buy, just for the toy. This is the case here, a gimmick that does work, but not worth the eight colorful episodes that are basically a two-hour movie spread thinly to make a series, and really not offering up anything revolutionary that hasn't been done before, and much better. If you enjoy this genre and haven't seen Money Heist yet, watch that instead of this, it's 1000x better.

But if you are still curious about this series, then I suggest to watch this in the following order: yellow, violet, orange, green, blue, red, pink. If you leave out white, your imagination would probably be a better resolution. If you're binging like I did, wait a week to enjoy your imagination's of heist day, then watch white to compare your ending to the finale... you'll get the most enjoyment this way. The other more obvious and probably makes the most sense for simplistic viewing is to watch this in chronological order - violet (24 years before), green (7 years before), yellow (6 weeks before), etc.