What is Kaleidoscope exactly? Creator Eric Garcia Explains Netflix’s New Heist Series With a Twist
The post What Is Kaleidoscope? Creator Eric Garcia Explains Netflix’s New Heist Series With a Twist The first to appear on Consequence.
Netflix’s newest heist drama has a fun, technologically-assisted twist to it — one that leads to over 5,000 different possible experiences for the viewer watching. KaleidoscopeStarring Giancarlo Esposito, Rufus Sewell, Jai Courtney, Paz Vega, Tati Gabrielle, and more, tells the story of daring thieves attempting to steal billions from one of the world’s most advanced safes. But the story is not told chronologically — instead, the show’s eight episodes are designed to be watched in any order, capturing specific time periods in relation to the heist, from 24 years beforehand to six months afterward.
It’s a complicated concept, but creator Eric Garcia tells Consequence that “I think there’s a lot of fun in mixing it up,” especially when married to a well-loved genre.
“People love heist stuff. I love heist stuff. Heist and crime is probably my favorite of all the genres,” he says. “For whatever reason, I think we’re drawn to that.” Launching on New Year’s Day, Garcia hopes that audiences enjoy it as their first binge of 2023: “We’ve got big action sequences, we’ve got good times. But it’s about revenge and people who are obsessed and people who can’t get out of their own way.”
As mentioned, it’s a complicated concept, which is why below we break down the biggest questions surrounding the series, from what originally inspired the concept to the opening title cards for each episode to why there’s a secret Spin Doctors reference in the mix.
[Editor’s note: The following contains mild spoilers for Kaleidoscope.]
What was the Original Inspiration? Kaleidoscope?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
There are two aspects to Kaleidoscope that led to its creation — the first being the inspiration for the story itself, which came from articles Garcia read about “these bonds that went missing during Hurricane Sandy — $70 billion might have gone missing. $70 billion, 7-0, it’s a crazy number. And then a week later they’re like, ‘Oh, they looked into it. It’s not that many. Maybe it was like 10 million.’ And then a week later they were just like, ‘nothing happened.’ I always was like, there’s something there.”
The second, of course, is the show’s structure, which Garcia says is something he’d been considering for at least the past eight years. “The earliest thing I can find on my computer is an email that I wrote to a friend of mine in 2014 — I said, ‘I think with batch delivery we don’t have to watch this in order. Right?’ We don’t. And then I was like, ‘I don’t really know what to do, but I think this can be done.’ And I laid out some rules you would have to have.”
Following that revelation, Garcia began developing the idea with Automatik’s Fred Berger and Scott Free’s Ridley Scott, David Zucker, and Jordan Sheehan, “and we started realizing there’s a way to combine these two things, especially because the notion of the structure to me speaks to the idea of shifting identities or shifting motivations. If you come in a certain place and you think this is somebody’s motivation, then you can highlight that sort of facet of that person’s personality. If you’re in it at a different place, you can highlight a different facet of that person. And so these were the two things mixed.”
In fact, that’s why telling a heist story using this structure was “helpful in a couple of ways,” Garcia says. “I wanted to make sure whatever genre we did it in, certainly for the first time while we were figuring out how to do this crazy thing, that it was a genre that spoke to shifting motivations and shifting character identities. So to me, that was interesting because here’s a way you can actually use the structure to speak to the nature of these characters and what I was trying to say thematically. There are a couple of other genres where you talk about shifting identities and motivations, but I don’t know that they all necessarily work. To me, the heist stuff worked well.”
What was the Original Title?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
The idea of framing every episode around a particular color was a key part of the series’ conception. This would then be used as the episode title. “The color idea was actually there from my very initial email, 2014,” Garcia says. “I said, ‘You can name [the episodes] You can either name them after their shapes or in colors. I was just saying you couldn’t do them linearly. You wouldn’t want to have them be 101 through 108. You wouldn’t want to have them be A, B, C, D, E. You’d have to give them something where people would not naturally go to [the first episode].”
However, at that point the series’ working title was Jigsaw, but as Garcia acknowledges, “we very quickly recognized that everybody was like, ‘Oh, like the horror thing?’ Across the board. So even in the writer’s room, we knew that this was going to be an issue. We talked with Netflix about the various options. Kaleidoscope We already have things that are colored so it was easy to come up quickly. We’ve already been leaning into our colors very heavily, and the notion of fractals, the notion of facets and things. There were several options. Kaleidoscope hit pretty hard.”
Because each episode’s opening title card does specify when each episode takes place in the show’s timeline, Garcia knows that “there are people who are going to watch it chronologically. That’s fine. I dig it. It should be chronologically coherent. It should be a normal show in that sense, so that’s fine with me.”
What are the various ways you can watch the show?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
Garcia says there are 5,040 combinations of episodes. This means that viewers can experience 5,040 different narrative experiences. Individual viewers will learn more about characters and get to see twists in different order. It’s a concept that explodes the idea of a communal viewing experience for the audience, which Garcia says was the goal.
“Hopefully, those 5,040 people, if you could put them all in one room, would have really robust conversations about that,” he says. “Let’s say, for example, somebody watched ‘Yellow,’ then ‘Red,’ then ‘Blue,’ and then somebody else watched ‘Blue,’ then ‘Red,’ then ‘Green’ or whatever. You could say, okay, in ‘Blue,’ when you saw such and such and such a thing, what did you think was going on? If you’ve seen ‘Red’ and ‘Yellow,’ but you haven’t seen ‘Violet,’ but one person did, they’re going to understand the motivations — whereas if somebody didn’t, they’re going to see different things.”
Garcia’s “excited for people to talk. I actually think it’s one of those shows that engenders conversation, because if you watch it in a silo, you’re watching it your way, and hopefully, you’re learning different things and seeing it different things, but it’s not until you either watch it a second time or discuss it with somebody else that you start to recognize that there are things that you may have missed, by watching it the order that you watched.”
What’s the Story With the Opening Title Cards for Each Episode?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
Each episode of Kaleidoscope opens with a brief title sequence for the series, followed by an episode-specific card, such as “Now Entering the Yellow Episode — Six Weeks Before the Heist.” Garcia says that “we went back and forth a ton on exactly what it was going to say. I can’t even remember all the different options.”
But while “Now Entering” is an unusual way of referring to the act of watching an episode of television, Garcia says they landed on it because “it speaks to two things. One, I believe it speaks to heist. We are entering into a vault. You are entering a thing. It’s about being on the outside. However, I prefer to think of the show as allowing us inside people if that makes sense. And inside the personalities, in a way.”
As he continues, “We find things out about each other, and we enter into each other’s lives and personalities at different stages in our lives, and we learn stories about each other until we have this sort of holistic view on one another. And to me, that’s what I want to do with the show. That’s what I want to do with these characters. So it all harkens back to that word, entering.”
How Many Wigs Exist? It seems like a lot
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
As you might expect from a series that takes place over a span of decades, the characters’ appearances change a lot, often with some help from a hairpiece. But beyond the obvious wigs seen on screen, Garcia says “there are wigs in there you don’t even know about.”
In that regard, he’s specifically referring to Judy, as played by Rosaline Elbay. “Judy’s hair looks like Rose’s hair, but that’s technically a wig. That’s a wig on her hair, of her hair because we were doing things to it, and we didn’t want to mess with her hair — she’s got beautiful hair,” he says. “So there’s that point in the ‘Yellow’ episode where Judy dresses up [in a wig]The wig is taken off by her in the bar. But she’s got another wig under that wig, so at times she would take it off, and the other wig would go flying. I feel like Rose, wears at least six or seven wigs at various points.”
Garcia praised hair stylist Angel De Angelis’s work on those transformations, as well as the effects teams that helped with de-aging Giancarlo Esposito and Rufus Sewell for the “Violet” episode, set 24 years before the heist. “Most of the de-aging stuff is fully practical. There’s a little CG here and there, but most of that is just our amazing SFX guys and what they were able to do there.”
Are there other time periods that could be used for possible episodes?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
As mentioned, the series’ time span dates back to the late 1990s. Garcia thought about going back further. “When I had originally thought of it, I wanted to go deep into the ’80s at one point. Partially, because I’m a child of the ’80s and I was like, I want those costumes and I want that music because that’s what I grew up with.”
The problem, they found, was that “we didn’t want to get separate actors for our two leads. Giancarlo should be able to portray himself at different ages. Rufus must be able to play his own role. We want Paz be able to play her part. So that hems you in a little bit.”
So while “Violet” is set in the ’90s, that choice was made primarily because of the amount of time it placed between the past and the present, not because Garcia wanted to pay tribute to that decade. Otherwise, he says, his priority was on divorcing the series from any date-specific timeline, so that “whether it’s now or 2025 or 2035 or 2055 or whatever,” the series would still play the same.
“That’s why we don’t say a date. You actually won’t see a date in the show unless I’ve screwed up somewhere. There were a couple of instances where I was like, ‘Wait, there’s a calendar on the wall. We have to CG that out.’ I was a giant pain in the ass because I would love for it to feel timeless, in the sense that the heist is now. The heist is today.”
That said, the costuming in “Violet” is all accurate to the late 1990s, as well as the needle drops. “We’ve got Sugar Ray playing in one bit. And that was very much, ‘What’s the most annoying song from the 1990s?’” Garcia says. What are the alternatives? Consequence points out that actually, Sugar Ray transcends space and time, Garcia laughs, acknowledging that “we Were singing it constantly.”
Another song considered for that episode was Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping,” and when the episode was specifically set in 1993, the plan was to use The Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes.” “And then my writers decided to slip dialogue from ‘Two Princes’ into every one of their scripts,” Garcia says. “There’s still one line — I won’t tell you which one it is, but there’s a line in there from ‘Two Princes’ that remained because I was like, ‘The line’s good, we’re just going to leave it.’ There are Easter eggs all over the thing, but that one has no point to it other than it’s amusing to us.”
Did the Plan Always Call for Two Post-Heist Episodes
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
The one way in which every viewer’s experience is the same is that if you follow Netflix’s randomly generated order, the final episode will always be the “White” episode, in which the actual heist takes place. But prior to that are the “Red” and “Pink” episodes, which are set the morning after the heist and then six months afterward, respectively.
Garcia claims that Garcia’s initial pitch contained plans to have Three Post-heist episodes were cut to two. “I think the thing about the post-heist episodes to me that I like, is that the one directly after, ‘Red,’ is the chaos directly after [the heist]. That’s our Reservoir Dogs Episode, so to say. And then ‘Pink’ gives you all of these theoretical finales, these notions — I think of ‘Pink’ as its own sort of mini revenge story. You can look at Point Blank Or, for instance. Simple plan — it’s about how greed and paranoia and things will tear you apart.”
Continues Garcia, “To me, I wanted both of those parts within it. It was wrong to have only one. It felt too many to have three. It had many other aspects I wanted to learn about, but it was taking away the fun of the old stuff. Therefore, the shift. But it used to be a little more even.”
Is There a “Perfect” Order for Watching the Series?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
In Garcia’s opinion, the answer to that is no — while there are so many ways to watch the series, he doesn’t think any particular order is the ideal one. “It sounds like such a bullshit answer, but it’s not,” he says. “I do not think there’s a ‘best order.’”
Part of that belief comes from the fact that he hasn’t watched every single possible order himself: “There are 5,040 orders, and I can’t.” But Garcia does acknowledge that there are episodes that “are easier, in terms of traditional storytelling, to be first, if you were going to structure this in a ‘regular’ way.” This includes “Yellow,” which actually was Consequence‘s first episode as provided by Netflix. As Garcia says, it works well as an entry point because “‘Yellow’ is ‘let’s get the gang together.’”
That said, you could end up starting with “Pink,” the last episode chronologically. “I love ‘Pink,’ I’m a dark motherfucker. There’s something about starting at the end — it’s not at all traditional, but it’s a different way in. I think if you start with ‘Pink,’ you have a really different viewpoint. People who start with ‘Pink’ are going to see Bob [played by Jai Courtney] in a very different way than if they start with ‘Yellow.’”
Is there a Season 2?
Kaleidoscope (Netflix)
Kaleidoscope is officially a limited series, but that doesn’t mean some sort of follow-up series is impossible. “In and of itself, as you’ve now seen, this story’s quite complete,” Garcia says. “Obviously, ‘White’ caps it with information, but ‘Pink’ caps it chronologically. Most of our characters, as you pointed out, are either dead or in prison, except for the few who managed to get out of this cyclical thing that they’re in.”
That said… “I love these characters. I adore my actors. I really, they’re all fantastic, also, just great people to work with,” Garcia says. “So I think there are ways theoretically to delve into these characters. You’ve got 17 years between ‘Violet’ and ‘Green.’ You’ve got seven years between ‘Green’ and ‘Yellow’ when they would all be around as well. So there are aspects to that.”
Also, he says, “should we end up doing a second season, I think there are other stories to get into, other genres to get into. There are ways to ‘kaleidoscope’ things differently, so to speak. So, I mean, we’ll see. I think I’m eager for people to see this, and if people really dig it, then we’ll see what happens. A lot of that’s in Netflix’s hands.”
Kaleidoscope Netflix now has it streaming.
What Is Kaleidoscope? Creator Eric Garcia Explains Netflix’s New Heist Series With a Twist
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