Kaleidoscope

The new series “Kaleidoscope,” premiering on Jan. 1, is intended to be viewed in any order, with its first seven episodes possible to scramble and remix however the viewer chooses ahead of a final installment. In this way, it seems to suggest itself in form as much as premiere date as ideal for a New Year’s Day binge. A perhaps gently hungover viewer may be coddled by the knowledge that viewing order doesn’t matter, and, for that matter, that pertinent information will be repeated as needed to make points clear.Kaleidoscope Season 1 Download

“Kaleidoscope” has an interesting enough story at its center — the whirring of its random-episode design overlays a story of a daring heist undertaken as a sort of revenge by a master criminal (Giancarlo Esposito) and his crack team. The issue with “Kaleidoscope,” though, is that its design is less an ingenious way of moving storytelling forward than the sort of thing a creator, or a streamer, does because it can. I suppose it’s novel enough to have a bunch of episodes available to watch in random order (although it’s not brand-new: The former CBS All Access launched in 2020 a series, “Interrogation,” built in a similar way). But it reminded me, a bit, of the George Perec novel translated into English as “A Void,” one that in French and English both is written without using the letter “E.” It’s a clever stunt, but do readers today remember the story, or simply the fact of its constraints?Here, those constraints mean that every episode must be legible to viewers who are coming in cold: It could be their first one. (For similar reasons, it feels as though just about everything about this show could be construed as a spoiler — suffice it to say that Esposito’s character is on a mission not merely to win back money but affection, and to harm an enemy in the process.) And I found myself yearning for the simplicity of a classically built TV pilot when first watching “Red,” an episode that takes place the morning after the heist.