When Narrative Conventions Kaleid(oscope)

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul created a legion of fans for actor Giancarlo Esposito. I'd count myself as one, open to checking out any movie or show he's in, simply because he's in it. That was how the Netflix show Kaleidoscope first came onto my radar: as a new, limited-run, 8-episode series starring Esposito. And about a heist! Count me in. But it turns out that "show starring the indelible villain from Breaking Bad" was by far the lesser of the two big marketing hooks for Kaleidoscope. The more prominent one was the gimmicky premise of the show itself.

Each of Kaleidoscope's 8 episodes is named for a color, and takes place in a specific point in the timeline surrounding a grand heist. The episode about the heist itself (White) comes last, after you've watched 7 preceding episodes setting up a web of context. But those 7 episodes are meant to be watched in any order. If the device you stream on supports Netflix's seldom-used "pathing technology," then Kaleidoscope will actually be served to you in a random order. And some quick math (7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2) determines that this makes for 5,040 different possible sequences in which this story might unfold.

I admit that this gimmick tantalized me. I had thoughts of Firefly on steroids. That show had to efficiently introduce all of its characters three times: in a pilot episode, a second pilot made after the network refused to air the original one first, and lastly in a feature film. If Kaleidoscope truly had 7 episodes that could all be "watched first," that would seem to mean that it had effectively 7 pilot episodes, all of which also had to serve to keep people already watching the series engaged. Tantalizing! In interviews, series creator Eric Garcia spoke of how different viewing orders might give you sympathy for different characters, make certain connections seem more potent, and more. It sounded very cool!

Cool as it sounds, it's not a concept that Kaleidoscope pulls off effectively. Watching episodes in a random order does a few things, but I think none of them match Garcia's stated goals, and none of them feel very good. You have to work much harder to hold the entire narrative in your head. It all but requires you to binge in the way Netflix demands, because the out-of-chronological details blur if you let too much time pass between episodes.

Whatever order you happen to get also heavily controls how fast you will make plot connections. I don't mean how soon you'll "guess the ending," but how quickly you'll actually learn what's important to each character, and which relationships matter most in the narrative. I found this to hurt the show rather than help it; part of being drawn into a good story is to understand and take interest in its characters, and that may or may not happen here with Kaleidoscope, depending on your viewing order.

There is a good story somewhere here, I'm pretty sure. I did find the final episode to be satisfying, but I believe that the particular order I watched in made it less satisfying to me than it might have been. It's simple math. There are 5,040 writer-sanctioned story orders here. That's a staggering number, and it's just not possible that they "playtested" all of them. Surely one could plot these options on a chart, and I'd wager that chart would take the form of a bell curve: many episode orders will be "fine," a handful will be "great," and another handful will be truly "bad."

Why leave that to chance? Why not do what writers have always done before and curate an order that gives the audience the best chance at a good experience? You can still tell the story out of order if you like; plenty of writers have done that, and sometimes with wonderful results. (See Memento.) But even in an out of order narrative, you can reveal information in a sequence that builds audience investment, benefits character empathy, and more. And I think it absolutely should have been done here.

Here is the order in which I watched Kaleidoscope: 1) Green; 2) Yellow; 3) Red; 4) Pink; 5) Orange; 6) Violet; 7) Blue; 8) White. And at the end of it all, I'd grade that experience a C; I would not recommend watching it the way I did. However, I suspect that an "average" experience watching Kaleidoscope would probably rate a B- (if you like the heist subgenre). And there are probably orders of watching it that might boost it to as high as a B+.

So if you haven't watched Kaleidoscope already and are game to try, I'm going to offer two suggestions. First, here's the order I would recommend. I probably haven't nailed the "single best order" out of 5,040 possibilities, but I'd be willing to say it's probably in the "top 10% possible": 1) Yellow; 2) Violet; 3) Green; 4) Orange; 5) Blue; 6) Red; 7) Pink; 8) White. Now it's worth noting that this order is rather close to chronological. It does incorporate some "flashbacks," but in a way that I think will illuminate character relationships in an orderly sequence that I wish had happened for me.

That said, it's pretty clear that the creator and writers of Kaleidoscope didn't want an order that's as "conventional" as the one I just proposed. So here's a second option you might try: 1) Blue; 2) Red; 3) Green; 4) Yellow; 5) Violet; 6) Orange; 7) Pink; 8) White. There's more of the narrative chaos in there that I believe the creators were after, but I still think that it would introduce key information in an order that will help the story by making the characters matter.

It's always been a given in watching a movie or TV series that a person's own life experience will inform the entertainment, making it so the exact same thing that thrills one person will repel another. It turns out that it's not a particularly smart idea (I think) to bake into the experience itself the possibility that we can't compare reactions because we didn't even see the same thing.