Hi, my username is Kaleidoscope Troper so you might already think I'm biased. I am, but the reason why I created this account was mainly to supply tropes for a series that didn't have enough for my liking at the time.
Kaleidoscope is decent. "Mystery" style shows like these offer a lot of ingenuity, and I'd say Kaleidoscope supplies that side pretty well, especially in episodes like Green or Yellow. If you've watched Knives Out: Glass Onion recently, you'll know that vibe where you have to pay attention to all the small little details that come at you throughout the show, because each one will be important later.
Kaleidoscope's gimmick is that its episodes are intentionally out of order. I've always speculated about that detail, and wondered if your viewing experience may vary in quality based on the order of episodes you watch. I'd personally say I got lucky with the way it was ordered for me, but who knows? Maybe I would've enjoyed the show more if I watched them differently. That said, I don't think you'll have any problem with its anachronic order and I find that to be a big strength on Eric Garcia's part, it couldn't have been easy to do.
My biggest critic is its (chronological) ending— I'll try to spoil as little as I can, but in the final episodes, I'd say the tone drops significantly. The show honestly gets depressing, and we just don't have enough material to say it the characters deserved their suffering, aside from that they're all criminals I guess, even though they were mainly shown in a sympathetic light beforehand. Having a tragic or downer message is fine, but the change in tone just comes out of the left field in my opinion.
The message of this ending skews just a bit into what I'd call "bad" territory— there's just a lot of injustice in the final (chronological) episodes. The moral is clear that revenge is wrong and unwarranted, a very classic Aesop, but the way they present it, you'd be easily confused into thinking the moral is "rich people are above consequences" or "you can get away with crime, but only if you commit the right ones". I doubt it was Eric's intent, but the moral was just poorly presented. But that's just my take.
Also, this show is absolutely not realistic and these "heists" are pretty wacky, so if you came into Kaleidoscope expecting a realistic setting or something that you could imagine happening in real life, you will be scratching your head many times.
If you like the kinds of shows that have details big and small that you should put in your head now because it'll be important later, If you like payoffs for your predictions and you like watching big plans come together and culminate in a big Rube Goldberg's machine of actions, consequences and plot twists, you'll enjoy Kaleidoscope. Probably not as much as the better ones in the genre (the Knives Out series comes to mind). It's a limited series and you can easily binge-watch it in a few hours for a viewing party.
Series Kaleidoscope. Decent!
Hi, my username is Kaleidoscope Troper so you might already think I'm biased. I am, but the reason why I created this account was mainly to supply tropes for a series that didn't have enough for my liking at the time.
Kaleidoscope is decent. "Mystery" style shows like these offer a lot of ingenuity, and I'd say Kaleidoscope supplies that side pretty well, especially in episodes like Green or Yellow. If you've watched Knives Out: Glass Onion recently, you'll know that vibe where you have to pay attention to all the small little details that come at you throughout the show, because each one will be important later.
Kaleidoscope's gimmick is that its episodes are intentionally out of order. I've always speculated about that detail, and wondered if your viewing experience may vary in quality based on the order of episodes you watch. I'd personally say I got lucky with the way it was ordered for me, but who knows? Maybe I would've enjoyed the show more if I watched them differently. That said, I don't think you'll have any problem with its anachronic order and I find that to be a big strength on Eric Garcia's part, it couldn't have been easy to do.
My biggest critic is its (chronological) ending— I'll try to spoil as little as I can, but in the final episodes, I'd say the tone drops significantly. The show honestly gets depressing, and we just don't have enough material to say it the characters deserved their suffering, aside from that they're all criminals I guess, even though they were mainly shown in a sympathetic light beforehand. Having a tragic or downer message is fine, but the change in tone just comes out of the left field in my opinion.
The message of this ending skews just a bit into what I'd call "bad" territory— there's just a lot of injustice in the final (chronological) episodes. The moral is clear that revenge is wrong and unwarranted, a very classic Aesop, but the way they present it, you'd be easily confused into thinking the moral is "rich people are above consequences" or "you can get away with crime, but only if you commit the right ones". I doubt it was Eric's intent, but the moral was just poorly presented. But that's just my take.
Also, this show is absolutely not realistic and these "heists" are pretty wacky, so if you came into Kaleidoscope expecting a realistic setting or something that you could imagine happening in real life, you will be scratching your head many times.
If you like the kinds of shows that have details big and small that you should put in your head now because it'll be important later, If you like payoffs for your predictions and you like watching big plans come together and culminate in a big Rube Goldberg's machine of actions, consequences and plot twists, you'll enjoy Kaleidoscope. Probably not as much as the better ones in the genre (the Knives Out series comes to mind). It's a limited series and you can easily binge-watch it in a few hours for a viewing party.