Kaleidoscope (2023)

Watchseries; It looked liek a fun idea and i was super excited to start the show. Untill Netflix decided do start my experience with Episode Black 0:51 seconds intro folowed by PINK ... Pink from all episodes , which is 6 months after the heist and contains a lot of references to all the other episodes and conclusions. The idea is great on paper but in reality it ruiend the most important part of the show for me the ending from the start. I don care how many puzzle parts or twist the story will have if i see them all resolved before i even know the caracters and their development. I will not watch another episode.

It looked liek a fun idea and i was super excited to start the show. Untill Netflix decided do start my experience with Episode Black 0:51 seconds intro folowed by PINK ... Pink from all episodes , which is 6 months after the heist and contains a lot of references to all the other episodes and conclusions. The idea is great on paper but in reality it ruiend the most important part of the show for me the ending from the start. I don care how many puzzle parts or twist the story will have if i see them all resolved before i even know the caracters and their development. I will not watch another episode.

Kaleidoscope watchseries. A heist thriller with a unique concept - eight episodes that can be watched in any order, with each episode featuring a different color code to indicate its place in the timeline. While this could have been a fun way to play with character and storytelling, it ultimately falls short. The repetitive character beats and thin ideas make the series feel manipulative and melodramatic, and the mid-season sag is a problem even without a traditional season structure. The performances from the cast, particularly Giancarlo Esposito and Rufus Sewell, are engaging, but the writing is shallow and fails to fully explore interesting themes like race. The action is fun at times, but the limited character development and thin ideas make it hard to fully invest in the story. Overall, "Kaleidoscope" is a disappointingly uneven series that fails to fully take advantage of its unique premise.

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.

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.

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.