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.

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.

Are you fed up with stories? Aren't they all becoming way too predictable, with their structured beginning, middle and end and cliched character arcs? Don't you wish for something novel, something that captures the unpredictability and 'chaos' of reality?

'Kaleidoscope' attempts something which, on the surface, appears quite revolutionary - the viewer is able to watch the episodes in any order and is encouraged to experiment - but is this merely a cheap tacked-on gimmick thought up at the last moment to try and inject some interest into an otherwise generic 'heist' drama?

Or is it something well thought-out that is intrinsically connected to the theme, plot and characters?

I'd say it's the former.

There was certainly nothing here that would entice me to ever watch the whole thing again in a different order. All the novelty of this approach achieved was a sense of dissatisfaction, distraction and a feeling that maybe it would have been better in the 'proper' order - whatever that was?

As for the drama itself - it was mildly entertaining nonsense.

The pacing was reasonably handled, it has a pretty decent cast and the heist itself was quite fun - all of which lift it just above average.

On the negative side, there was some terrible 'de-ageing' employed in one episode and I feel for the viewers who end up watching that one first. Also, none of the characters were particularly believable, there were multiple plot contrivances and the character arcs were limited and predictable. In other words, the story wasn't very well written - putting it in a different order isn't going to fix that.

I can't say which order I watched it in without delving too much into spoilers, on the other hand the whole concept means spoilers will occur for some as a consequence of the order they watch it in. All in all - a failed experiment.

For any other budding writers - master the basics before you mess with the formula.

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.

So, there was a lot of potential in the script, but a couple of things was a big letdown.

The story could easily have been told in 4 * 45 min episodes. The amount of fillers was annoying.

The plot is in many aspect not believeable, there are so many strange plot twists, and those are like... "What are they doing, have they lost it? " Even the episode that contains the money shot is to be honest rather bad... A heist story is easy to tell, and we as an audience do want the story to be at least party believeable, but nope, this is not the show that worth watching.

There are so many other heist movies out there.