Netflix’s Kaleidoscope has a random episode order, but it’s still boring

It’s tempting to believe a great heist story, whether it’s in a movie or a series, is like great jazz: A collection of seemingly disparate parts, each excellent but incomplete on their own, get combined together to create something transcendent. At least, that’s the hope behind Netflix’s new heist series KaleidoscopeEach viewer is given a random episode order by. Unfortunately, the show never really makes a song worth listening to, and mostly feels like a din of out-of-tune instruments, no matter what order they’re in.

KaleidoscopeEric Garcia created the following:Repo Men), follows Leo Pap (Giancarlo Esposito, who seems to pick a new voice at random at the start of each episode), a former thief looking to return to the life for one last job.

Depending on the order of your episodes, when we meet Leo he’s either about to break out of prison, or he’s dead set on revenge via the biggest job he can think of: hitting his former partner who now runs a security company with a high-tech underground vault. To pull off the job, Leo gets together a crew that includes Ava Mercer (Paz Vega), Judy Goodwin (Rosaline Elbay), Stan Loomis (Peter Mark Kendall), RJ Acosta (Jordan Mendoza), and Bob Goodwin (Jai Courtney) — I’d describe the characters more, but the show doesn’t bother, so why should I.

Image by Netflix

Again, however, you can’t be certain of the order in which any information is presented. It is possible to start by introducing Leo to the crew. You could get a preliminary heist as your midpoint, or you could get several episodes worth of flashbacks about Leo and his former partner, or the stunningly incompetent FBI agent who’s chasing him and his crew. The episodes only focus on relationships between members of the team, even if they are filled with extra details. Instead of any sort of personality or other information that could make it more relatable, first day-of-class facts are revealed like one character wanting to play the drums while another wants to retire at the beach.

A fascinating fact about randomization is the following: There are some limits to how many episodes may appear, and that everyone ends with exactly the two.

While this format is almost interesting at first blush, its problems become clear with a little more thought: There’s nothing fundamentally interesting about learning things in a random order. Kaleidoscope’s basic assumption was wrong the whole time. Heists aren’t jazz, they’re clocks. There’s no improv, just carefully crafted precision, and problems only experts can solve.

Clifton Prescod/Netflix

The heist genre is known for its non-linear storytelling, especially in the more recent versions like Oceans. Reservoir Dogs. These narratives must be executed with precision and clockwork in order to succeed. Like a good heist movie, great timing is key. You need to reveal your characters just at the right moment. Also, you must know when you have to add a new twist. Kaleidoscope’s gimmick renders that kind of perfectly-guided fun almost impossible.

But it’s not like the release format is the fundamental issue of the show either: it’s boring, no matter what order the episodes came in.

Rather than slow-playing the build-up of Leo’s crew, Kaleidoscope throws them all together quickly, and mostly over the course of just one episode — which proves not to be a sign that the group-dynamic is the highlight of the show, but rather a vast miscalculation about the cast of characters and their chemistry.

While each character on its own is dull and monotonous, when combined they can become a messy mess of shouting and unclear motivations. Worst of all, it’s not even clear why any of them are here. We’re told over and over again Leo Pap is a master thief, but all we see is him bungle a few low-level jobs earlier in life. Meanwhile, every side character just seems like more trouble than they’re worth, with most of them feeling like they’re at best one Google search smarter than the audience about everything from safe cracking to explosives.

Netflix Photo

The show and its characters lack the charm that would make the tedious shuffle of episodes any more enjoyable. Even the heist itself, which has an hour devoted to it but still mostly manages to be about walking from one place to the next, can’t find a way to be exciting or slick. It’s a series of plans we haven’t seen discussed or practiced, with almost no twists in sight — which is a waste, considering this episode seems to always play out as the penultimate one of the series. The fixed point means the show knows exactly what information we’ll have going in, so it could be full of twists that contextualize each episode or our understanding of the group or the plan. Instead, it’s yet another missed opportunity for Kaleidoscope.

These glaring problems cannot be attributed solely to the random order. These issues are all easily explained by bad television. Experimenting with release strategy isn’t fundamentally a bad thing. Netflix’s binge model still works for certain specific shows, but on the whole it’s gotten stale. Then there are word-of–mouth successes like Separation White LotusOr half of the world still waiting with bated breath to see the next episode House of the Dragon are all good indicators people don’t mind waiting a week to see what happens next. But if Netflix insists on continuing to release most of its shows all at once, why shouldn’t a few of them experiment with their form in a way that could get people talking?

It could also be a great fit for another genre. It’s easy to see how a semi-random order for a mystery series could lead fans to comparing notes halfway through, or how a complex drama told from multiple perspectives could alter our sympathies for one character or another depending on who we got attached to first. Although these ideas are fascinating, they require the particularity of each genre to work.

Image by Netflix

Great mysteries are more than rides. They can also be solved by the viewers. A mystery story leaves clues for us to solve, letting us nip at the heels of fiction’s greatest detectives while feeling like the playing field is at least somewhat even. Heists are exactly the opposite. This is because characters know much more than us and keep the secrets from the public.

Kaleidoscope’s pacing feels nonsensical, which might seem like it’s the obvious fault of the random order. But, given that’s true for each of the show’s eight individual episodes, maybe that isn’t the result of the random order, but the show it’s pasted onto. Maybe this show just doesn’t know how to tell a story. Whether it’s big or small; in order or not.

This feels exactly like Netflix randomlyizing. Kaleidoscope’s episodes was to compel friends to urge each other to continue the show so they can reach the next big episode or moment. But the show’s big moments never come, and by the time you realize the show is random, or why that matters, your friends have probably turned it off long ago. You can’t fault them.

The eight episode of KaleidoscopeSeason 1 is now available on Netflix.