The new series “Kaleidoscope,” premiering on Jan. 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 …
,” premiering on Jan. 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. In this way, it seems to suggest itself in form as much as premiere date as ideal for a New Year’s Day binge. 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.
“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 and his crack team. 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. I suppose it’s novel enough to have a bunch of episodes available to watch in random order .
Here, those constraints mean that every episode must be legible to viewers who are coming in cold: It could be their first one. 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.
In this episode, and in others I watched as the ground beneath my feet grew firmer and I came to understand the story, coincidence reigned, dialogue was stilted and awkward, and settings were low-budget and diffidently filmed. As with “Bandersnatch,” Netflix’s interactive “Black Mirror” episode, and one of the weaker entrants in that show’s canon, the device came to seem like a way to make an underbaked show worth discussing.