Heist drama with a novelty spin that isn't very novel: Netflix's Kaleidoscope reviewed

Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end, you can view the episodes in any order, meaning that each viewer has a slightly different experience.

If I sound mildly sceptical, it’s because the novelty isn’t actually that novel. B.S. Johnson got there 54 years earlier with his 1969 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates, an account of a football match in which the chapters were loose bound so that they could be shuffled and read in whatever order you wished. A few years ago, I bought a rare first edition from Simon Finch which I thought would become very valuable but hasn’t because price is subject to demand and frankly there isn’t much demand for experimental 1960s novelists of whom hardly anyone has heard.

I love B.S. Johnson and highly recommend his book, not just for the meandering charm of his writing but for the tactile pleasure and amusement value of his literary jeu d’esprit. He deserves to be far better known and it would be lovely if his final words to his agent the day before, aged 40, he slit his wrists – ‘I shall be much more famous after I’m dead’ – were to come true. But I’m still not sure his experiment amounts to much more than a cute gimmick.

The problem with The Unfortunates, as with Kaleidoscope, is that when everyone is exposed to the same beginning and ending (these are non-negotiable) what happens in the middle doesn’t actually change much. Sure, you might learn earlier or later than other viewers precisely what tragic event it is that motivates our hero/anti-hero Leo Pap (Giancarlo Esposito) to want to break into the impregnable security system overseen by his friend-turned-bitter enemy Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell), but it makes no difference to the outcome and little to the viewer’s perspective.