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Television

Netflix Reveals a Series That Is Designed To Be Watched in Any Order You Choose (thewrap.com) 66

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Netflix's new anthology series "Kaleidoscope" will give viewers their own unique experience watching a team of skillful thieves attempt to pull off a robbery they've been planning for over 20 years. From a report: In a sneak peek clip, the cast and crew share the intricacies of the series and how it's making a new spin on the traditional anthology series. "Every episode had multiple connections to every other episode," said the show's creator, showrunner and executive producer Eric Garcia in the clip. Garcia is also one of the "Kaleidoscope" writers.

In the eight-part series, the audience will follow "a crew of masterful thieves and their attempt to crack a seemingly unbreakable vault for the biggest payday in history. Guarded by the world's most powerful corporate security team, and with law enforcement on the case, every episode reveals a piece of an elaborate puzzle of corruption, greed, vengeance, scheming, loyalties and betrayals," reads a description of the show, which premieres on Netflix Jan. 1.
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Netflix Reveals a Series That Is Designed To Be Watched in Any Order You Choose More

Netflix Reveals a Series That Is Designed To Be Watched in Any Order You Choose

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  • So... a regular situational TV show? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:04PM (#63072130)

    Isn't that just a normal TV show?

    • Re:So... a regular situational TV show? (Score:5, Funny)

      by dmay34 ( 6770232 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:08PM (#63072134)

      "So I got this idea... Imagine a TV show about a dad with three daughters that recently lost his wife, and his two best friends come and live with him in San Francisco to help him out and get into all kinds of comedy hijinks! I call it "Full House".

      And here is the kicker: The audience can watch the show in ANY ORDER!"

    • Some series are supposed to be watched in order, but are so insufferably slow and incomprehensible that you can watch them out of order just to enjoy the ambience.

      A prime example of this is Twin Peaks. To this day, I still have no idea what it's all about. And I did try to watch it in order! I found it enjoyable enough though.

      • Twin Peaks is about US Government experiments accidentally opening a portal to another dimension inhabited by entities capable of possessing humans, leading to a series of murders. Anything deeper is fabricated by people looking too hard.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          Twin Peaks is about US Government experiments accidentally opening a portal to another dimension inhabited by entities capable of possessing humans, leading to a series of murders.

          That would be "Strangers Things". No? Is nothing original?

          • Haven't seen it, so I can't say. But it wouldn't surprise me to know it was recycled premises slathered in shiny new netflix paint.

      • I find most series I just can't get into if I watch out of order, it's gets too confusing. Except for sitcoms, but those get old fast.

    • Re:So... a regular situational TV show? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Cinder6 ( 894572 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:11PM (#63072140)

      The pitch seems a little different, since the episodes build toward a specific climax. A traditional, non-serial show, by contrast, has largely disconnected episodes. But you're right—this doesn't sound particularly novel, just an advertisement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It reminds me of microservices. XML "web services" were the rage in the early 2000's. Somebody changed the XML to JSON and claimed it was both novel and revolutionary. (It's not; there's a right place and time for them, but it's not everywhere, unlike what the fad puppies imply.)

      And mini-computers were renamed to "servers" to make them sound novel and innovative. Innovative marketing, maybe.

      You youngbies are silly.

    • Isn't that just a normal TV show?

      Outside of sitcoms I think "normal" TV shows now have multi-episode plot arcs.

      Traditional TV shows on the other hand were largely stand-alone because streaming didn't exist and syndication was the holy grail so you couldn't count on a viewer watching in any particular order nor could you assume they'd seen any particular episode.

      But it sounds like you are meant to watch every episode, but in any order. It's an interesting gimmick that might work in kind of the same way that improv works in contrast to sketc

      • In reality I expect they do it by doing something like following a single character from start to finish. I can see some interesting scenarios doing that, say a character dies. If you see the episodes of other characters first you see some ominous signs something bad happened (but no confirmation), but once you know the character is dead and watch the remaining episodes you'll have this tragic knowledge that the characters lack.

        Arrested Development season 4 did something like this: each episode generally fo

      • Personally I think jumping around in time is already an over-exploited narrative device in books and movies. Of course they jumble it in a certain order rather than choose-your-own, so OK this is a bit different.

        • Personally I think jumping around in time is already an over-exploited narrative device in books and movies. Of course they jumble it in a certain order rather than choose-your-own, so OK this is a bit different.

          Well I'm thinking more of here's the same story, but now from this character's point of view, which has certainly been done, but not to this scale. Not to mention when there is a conflict between two characters the hero/villain get switched depending on the perspective.

          Of course, I could also be completely wrong in how they're planning to do it.

    • Well, there have always been TV shows that introduced long arcs. Prime time soaps, for instance, would have been largely incomprehensible if you were just randomly picking episodes here and there. But for the most part, yes, writers maintained an episodic structure other than the odd two parter. But by the 1990s a number of shows like NYPD Blue and ER were borrowing heavily from the soap opera concept. Then you had some the more subtle arcs of X Files, where there were lots of "monster of the week" episodes

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dmay34 ( 6770232 )

        "...is basically a series of 7-8 hour movies. It gives writers and directors the opportunity to tell stories in a more fulsome fashion."

        I honestly think that's what most of the initial Disney+ shows were. They were planned out to be movies and then streeeeeeeeeeched out to be 8 episodes.

    • Isn't that just a normal TV show?

      Perhaps a recent Word-a-Day calendar for someone at Netflix was "Episodic" ...

  • Nothing new (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:07PM (#63072132)

    Columbo, Murder She Wrote, The Love Boat... all series designed to be watched and enjoyed in no particular order by mentally diminished elderly care home residents, even if they fall asleep smack in the middle of the episode.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )

      false, Colombu and Murder She Wrote had clue findings and reveals that built on each other. Maybe you're the narcoleptic who thinks things don't have plot.

      • Of course they have plots, and of course they can be enjoyed in full. Some Columbo episodes were really quite epic. That's not what I said.

        What I said was, if you're a grandpa and you catch any episode at any date - usually one you can't remember, either the episode or the date - you fall asleep 5 minutes after the beginning and you wake up 5 minutes before the end, it's still enjoyable.

        It wasn't a criticism: those series really were designed for that! The format was tightly calibrated and completely unchan

        • I think Love Boat is the only show in your list with vapid enough plot line where missing most the episode doesn't lose anything of value. Gramps can always watch for the binikis too, forget the plot

    • Those were also standalone plots. You don't need to know anything about the last episode to make sense of the current one. Except for the rare two-parts. all you have to know is that Columbo is a detective, and don't worry about Mrs Columbo because you never get to meet her you only hear about her (except perhaps for a spinoff series afterwards). Jessica Fletcher, mystery writer who lives in a town where there's a murder every single week that she solves (more people die there than the entire population

    • Throw most of Trek on this list. ToS and TNG especially.
      • This is true of Star Trek TOS, but not necessarily TNG or later series. TNG, DS9, Voyager and so on all had over-arching stories and character development which put them in a different situation from TOS and a lot of early TV shows which were intended to be stand alone episodes. Most TNG episodes don't feed into a larger, complex plot, but the characters do grow and change over time, making it weird if you watch the series out of order.

        You can watch _almost_ any TOS episode in any order (with a few rare

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lsllll ( 830002 )
          Yeah. Watching Encounter at Far Point after having watched the whole series is painful. OTOH, watching Inner Light and the first borg 2 episode series over and over never gets old.
          • With TNG, I'd say its more that the writers figured out the characters after a while. There is some character growth and a few episodes feed off each other, but seasons 3 - 7 can really be watched in any order. For the first couple seasons, it was like they didn't really know what to do with the characters. DS9 would be confusing if you don't watch in order. Voyager can be watched in any order, but is better if you go from start to finish. I've never watched Enterprise in its entirety.

            New Star Trek

    • Re:Nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CubicleZombie ( 2590497 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @05:30PM (#63072354)

      Columbo, Murder She Wrote, The Love Boat... all series designed to be watched and enjoyed in no particular order

      Or Firefly, according to Fox.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )

        Columbo, Murder She Wrote, The Love Boat... all series designed to be watched and enjoyed in no particular order

        Or Firefly, according to Fox.

        Alas, all too true.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Ocker3 ( 1232550 )
        #AlwaysTooSoon

  • Next up is a choose your own adventure style series, with short (5-10 minute) episodes where you pick what happens next.

  • You mean like "Firefly"? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt.nerdflat@com> on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @04:29PM (#63072206) Journal
    Oh.... Too soon?
    • I'd like to believe that it might have been a successful series if Fox network idgits hadn't scrambled the order of the episodes.

      • I'm pretty sure the decision maker that killed Firefly is the same douchebag that hired Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, then immediately thought the best possible idea was to sew his mouth shut. He's going to the special hell, if anybody ever will. And I'll bet, if he has any brains at all, he's still crying over the returns on the first two Deadpool films. What a dipshit.

        People that hate genre films and shows really should stay out of being decision makers on them. It leads to all sorts of rubbish. Like live-ac

        • At the time, I heard that some of the Fox execs didn't like Whedan, but were contractually obligated to pick up his show, so they killed it. It was too bad, because the show had a lot of promise.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      Yes, after watching the 2-part episode 'Serenity', you can watch 'The Train Job,' 'Our Mrs. Reynolds', 'Heart of Gold', 'Bushwhacked', 'Shindig', and 'Jaynestown', in any order.

      After that, it gets more complicated.

    • Take my angry upvote!

  • then feed it to me in the best order. If I can watch it in any order it just means there is no best order.

  • I was going to say the same thing many people commented already; that this is nothing new at all. Plenty of TV shows were just fine to view in any order you wished. Usually though, they accomplish that by writing tidy little 30 minute to 1 hour long stories that start and conclude within one episode. Any additional "depth" you get from those, after watching enough episodes, comes from the character development. You learn a random aspect of a character's personality in an episode here and one there, rewardin

    • It still seems kind of pointless. Most people are just going to watch the episodes in the order presented. I doubt anybody is going to rewatch episodes in a different order to see how it compares.

  • Rick Sanchez! (Score:3)

    by Cpt_Kirks ( 37296 ) on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @05:49PM (#63072388)

    You sonofabitch, I'm in!

  • Almost every show before the 90s was like this. Sure they had some references to previous shows but nothing that would be considered a 'serial' like so many new shows. It was more like inside jokes and such.

    Remember in the not so distant past shows were on a schedule every evening on broadcast TV. If you missed it and didn't have a vcr you just missed it and had to wait for a rerun months later if at all, but next week's show would not depend on what you had missed otherwise viewers would lose interest be

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      From the summary it seems to be exactly the opposite. Instead of self-contained, each episode is connected to all the others, so you can view them at any order, but you discover all the twists in a different way so they have a different impact.
      An example of this is the excellent novel Pale Fire. You can read the annotations (which make up the narrative basically) either in order, or following their references which jump you back and forth and you have a different experience with each method, as the revelati

  • I have to question the quality of any show where the main feature being advertised is something that's been around since the inception of television. Next you'll be telling me I can record what I see on my screen to magnetic tape with a device that we will call a Video Cassette Recorder!

  • For which every network that airs it uses a different order, and none of them are the right order. Actually, figuring out the ideal order is half the fun. Some episodes have narrative ordering constraints, others flow better thematically......does the argument in X work better before or after Y and Z are a couple...?

  • They've broken up a story arc into small parts and included a bit of each act in each episode. So presumably there's a bit of the ending in each episode, etc.

  • Twilight Zone. The Outer Limits. Black Mirror. Tales From the Crypt. Even X-Files, which if you did not care about the long term storyline were mostly fine on a standalone basis.

    I actually prefer shows like this. No need to get invested in a series. Can watch any one any time with no follow up ever.

  • This sounds like a series version of the Roshomon storytelling technique. Each episode tells the same story but from different character perspectives from the other episodes. So you can watch the episodes in any random order. The appeal is that you learn certain details about the story and characters in whichever episode you watch.

  • This is just another instance of either a stupid marketing person who knows little of the past, or a foul marketing person, who presumes everybody else knows nothing of the past, pushing an old idea as though it is some new breakthrough. This is not an ACTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, it's a MARKETING BREAKTHROUGH (always guaranteed to be craptastic), This "new idea" has nothing on Star Trek from the 1960s, which could be watched in any order (like MOST shows of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s...)

  • sounds like any regular show that has running connected story line but no requirement for watching in order. e.g. Doctor Who

  • Maybe I'll watch this in reverse order just to be able to call them out on that. - Why does this sound like an XKCD caption?

  • Didn't you ever notice that if you missed a Star Trek....

  • gimmicks don't work

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