Is it enough to tell a straight story anymore? One with a simple beginning, middle and end? You sometimes wonder, because while so many TV dramas love to jump back and forth in time, to Netflix that is beginner’s stuff. Four years since the Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch offered a “choose your own adventure”-style interactive drama, the streaming platform has raised the stakes again with Kaleidoscope, the latest arrival atop its homepage, and one already getting a truckload of online analysis.
You want a bold narrative gimmick? Try an eight-part heist drama that allows you to watch the first seven episodes in any order you wish before you get to the plot-unifying final episode.
The immediate question that springs to mind is “why?” Netflix explains: “The order in which [viewers] watch the episodes will affect their viewpoint on the story, the characters, and the questions and answers at the heart of the heist.” So how you watch the series will colour your feelings towards the master thief Leo Pap (played by Giancarlo Esposito; Breaking Bad’s Gus Fring) and his crew, as betrayal and other threats undermine their plans to fleece billions from Euro bankers. And Pap has personal history with his main target, a boo-hiss security mogul played by Rufus Sewell.
Colour is an operative word. Each episode is named after one, with the Green prison-break episode given a visual palette to match, as with the Yellow diamond-robbery episode and so on as the high concept reaches an altitude comparable to that of K2.
Does this sound like hard work? Well, it doesn’t have to be, because you can just watch the series in the order presented to you by Netflix’s “next episode” option, which will take you through the backstories and motivations of each robber in straightforward enough fashion. In which case you get a classy but gritty heist thriller — Ocean’s Eleven without the ritz — that pays attention to the emotional stakes of its characters. Yet that would be to miss the point of the series, which has surely been built for you to experiment with its conceit. And you’d need to be very time rich indeed to rewatch it in every order possible.
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A scan of various nerdy websites suggests that there could be more than 40,000 ways to watch it (anyone is welcome to try explaining that to me). That perhaps ups the ante on even Bandersnatch, which did something comparable with its myriad forks in the narrative decided by you and your remote control — and ditto subsequent interactive Netflix shows such as the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt finale, Charlie Brooker’s Cat Burglar (his animated love letter to Looney Tunes cartoons) and Bear Grylls’s survival-adventure fun You vs Wild.
In offering different experiences by episode order rather than viewer-chosen narrative path, Kaleidoscope has more in common with BS Johnson’s 1969 “book in a box” novel The Unfortunates, with which chapters were presented in a box to be read in random order. That apparently offered 15.5 septillion(!) combinations in which the story could be read.
Has Netflix made such TV junkies out of the world that spending so long on a show is desirable? It’s easy to applaud the streamer for being adventurous, because everyone forever thinks they want to experience something new when it comes to TV or film. But the eternal question remains: when is technology giving us a bold new narrative form, and when is it a novelty gimmick? As someone who last week sat through Avatar: The Way of Water in “4D” — being pummelled and shaken violently for three hours by a hydraulic chair — I can attest that new is not always better.
Kaleidoscope is, it must be said, far more down to earth, and is cleverly crafted by its creator, Eric Garcia — however you order the episodes (chronologically/randomly/in reverse?) you get a straightforward heist thriller that makes sense. A potential problem is that when you are partly in charge of the narrative, your trust in the screenwriter’s painstakingly plotted journey of tension and jeopardy starts to wobble. Or rather, when you watch the show it could be with a nagging sense that you may not be getting the best out of it; that you are seeing certain reveals too early and there may be a more satisfying route to the White finale than the one you’re taking.
Start again and reshuffle the jigsaw? That may reap new rewards, but really, who has the time? No doubt the internet forums will work out an optimal episode order so you can watch it as . . . an old-fashioned linear TV series.
Kaleidoscope is out now on Netflix
