As thief Leo Pap,Giancarlo Esposito (with Paz Vega) is an imposing fulcrum of the heist thriller Kaleidoscope.Credit:David Scott Holloway
This slick heist thriller doesn’t just want to catch you out with plot twists,it wants to alter the very narrative to reframe your perceptions of the story.Kaleidoscope has eight colour-coded episodes:White,the actual robbery,will always screen last,but otherwise the previous seven episodes appear in a random order. It’s not just a matter of answers first,questions later. What you first learn about the characters,especially Giancarlo Esposito’s thief Leo Pap,impacts how you interpret what they subsequently do.
Yes,it’s a gimmick,but it works because the individual blocks are sturdy enough to support multiple journeys through 25 years of storytelling. My own sequencing was more conventional,starting with Yellow,which was set six months before the heist and briskly provided an introduction to Leo and the crew he assembles. If the first episode had been Pink,which occurred six months after and serves as an elegy,what followed would have felt tragic.
The creator of this limited series,Eric Garcia,is playing with the judgments we make,and even our own biases. The unfolding of Leo,who has a grudge against the owner of the supposedly impregnable New York vault he intends to rob,Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell),is somewhat transparent. But the arc of others,notably Hannah Kim (Tati Gabrielle),is revelatory in very different ways depending on your viewing order. Crime dramas always turn on questions of trust,butKaleidoscope wants you to doubt yourself.
As a genre work it has a swaggering ease,reminiscent in part ofOcean’s Eleven,and some of the supporting cast,particularly Jai Courtney’s loose unit Bob Goodwin,are exuberantly familiar. After decades of supporting roles,most notably asBreaking Bad’s Gus Fring,Esposito is an imposing fulcrum,giving boilerplate lines such as “Are you in or are you out?” a tempting charge. He is,however,64-years-old,and while that matches the breadth of Leo’s experience,playing 25 years younger is very much a stretch.
Set during a hurricane-like storm,White is a satisfying finale on crime terms,complete with pay-offs to mysteries established in prior instalments. But the real achievement here may be that the non-linear distribution is itself a decoy. If you focus,for example,on the motivations of a persistent FBI agent,Nazan Abassi (Niousha Noor),you might be caught out by what is the most profound revelation the show delivers.Kaleidoscope might be an enjoyable show about thievery,but its most crucial element is what it surreptitiously adds in.
High School ★★★★
Amazon Prime
High School is based on a memoir by Canadian alternative music stars Tegan and Sara Quin.Credit:Michelle Faye/Amazon
This coming-of-age drama is a small wonder. Adapted from the 2019 memoir of the same name by Canadian alternative pop stars Tegan and Sara,it manages to be both sharply specific about their teenage discovery of sexuality and music in the Calgary suburbs in the mid-1990s,and more broadly a deeply felt summation of the adolescent experience,whether confusing,obsessive,or joyous. Every lens excels.