#Kaleidoscope app review tv

One character looks at the mess and sighs “What the fuck is this shit?” Having sat through all of Kaleidoscope, I can relate.I've been keenly aware of Kaleidescape since the company's start when I first laid eyes on its beautiful onscreen interface at a high-end A/V store in Seattle. In one episode, a case breaks open and sheets of coloured paper spill out all over the floor. As a story, though, it’s messy and frustrating. You’re welcome.Īs a storytelling experiment, Kaleidoscope has some merit. If you haven’t seen it yet, please do so in the following order: Violet, Green, Yellow, Orange, Blue, White, Red, Pink. The more I think about it, though, the more I’m convinced that the only way to watch Kaleidoscope is to do it chronologically. Clearly, lots of work has gone into making the whole thing cohesive in any order, but most of the time it still feels arbitrary a bunch of flashbacks and flash-forwards hurled around in a blender and dished up with no thought of narrative satisfaction. There will come a point during Kaleidoscope, I guarantee, where you will start longing for the authoritative hand of a creator to guide you through. Now, even if by some miracle we do end up watching it at the same time, it doesn’t matter because none of us are watching the same thing anyway. And Kaleidoscope feels like another moment of destruction.

#Kaleidoscope app review tv

For all its brilliant convenience, Netflix destroyed this to the extent that people couldn’t discuss TV with friends without a careful little dance to ensure they wouldn’t spoil anything. For most of its existence, the joy of television was knowing we were all watching the same programmes at the same time. Bad luck if you watch that one first, by the way. Perhaps it’s because, in the actual chronological ending, Esposito has a moment of such powerhouse emotion that everything afterwards – including the planned finale itself – feels like an afterthought. Perhaps it’s how anticlimactic every episode feels because cliffhangers are impossible since by the nature of the format they won’t be resolved. Perhaps it’s the way that all the characters have to be very subtly introduced in every episode because it might be the first one you see. It really isn’t bad at all.īut sliced up and flung at you at random, it loses something. Sometimes it plays out like Hustle, sometimes like Heat.

The cast includes Rufus Sewell and Jai Courtney and, in a brief break from starring in everything else that has ever been made, Giancarlo Esposito. It isn’t A-grade prestige drama, but it is fun and intermittently gripping – and just about preposterous enough to remain entertaining. What is so frustrating about Kaleidoscope is that once you have sat through the whole thing and reordered it in your brain, it’s a pretty good show. You will just have experienced it in a subtly different way. By the time the credits roll on the finale, you will know as much about the show as everyone else who watches it. You won’t gain access to any new scenes by watching the episodes in a certain order. Unlike, say, Bandersnatch – the interactive Black Mirror special designed to mimic the Choose Your Own Adventure books – everyone who finishes Kaleidoscope will have seen precisely all of it. The show wants you to end on White, which is the heist episode itself, but there’s nothing stopping you from watching it however you like. Then they might jump to Violet (another flashback), or Red (set in the immediate aftermath of the heist), or Blue (where the heist is being planned), or any of the other variously coloured episodes. Some will start with the episode entitled Green, which takes the form of a flashback. We are promised that there are 40,320 ways in which we can experience Kaleidoscope.