Kaleidoscope - Netflix Series

Kaleidoscope Season 1 Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes TV

This series is being promoted as one where the episodes can be viewed in any order. We tried the 'first' one just to see if we could watch it. It was okay, so we started on the second. Then we got into a disagreement about the timeline. The first episode was seven weeks ago, wasn't it? Couldn't be, that wouldn't make any sense, so we go back and check and it turns out that its place in the timeline was seven years ago, so now we look over all the episodes, and we find one from 24 years ago and decide that that's where we want to start.

Jumping around in time is something we have seen in several series. In some cases the shifts in the timeline are clear and well defined and those in shows the time shifts are tolerable. In others the shifts are not obvious and it gets to be a lot of work to keep things sorted out. I am not sure there is any benefit to these jumbled timelines. If the characters and the story are interesting, I don't think jumbling the timeline adds anything. It just makes it harder to figure out what's going on. I think we can blame this all on Momento where the whole movie was a set of scenes shown in reverse order.

Back to our show. What we have is a pair of thieves. One is a handsome white man who dresses in suits and ties (Rufus Sewell as Roger Salas / Graham Davies), walks in the front door and charms the pants off the mark, so to speak. The other is technically competent black man (Giancarlo Esposito as Leo Pap / Ray Vernon) who sneaks in the back door while his partner is oozing charm and makes off with goodies. Naturally, when you have both operations (front door and back door) going on at the same time the whole operation is fraught with tension, and then there are the cock-ups when they come with a hairsbreadth of getting caught. Exciting stuff!

Exciting stuff! That's kind of important, because these guys are now middle aged and doing well enough that they really don't need to be putting it all on the line, but . . . it's in their blood and they just can't give up their thieving ways.

The technical details are a little sketchy in some places, and there is some slop, but I suspect this show is mostly about motivation. 

Technically it's not bad, and the ideas are pretty good, but the details aren't perfect. For example, our black man sneaks out of prison by hiding in the trunk of the doctor's giant Cadillac. He's tucked into the space behind the rear seat, above the rear axle, with a fake panel covering him. The doctor is a regular visitor to the prison and the guards check the trunk every time he leaves. An observant guard would have noticed something different in the layout of the trunk. This guard didn't, this time and that was all our man needed. Of course I noticed, but I'm a car guy. Most people aren't, so maybe I'm just picking nits.

IMDB has this little blurb:

Spanning 24 years, Kaleidoscope centers around the largest heist ever attempted, and the vengeance, scheming, loyalties, and betrayals that surround it. It's loosely inspired by the real-life story where seventy billion dollars in bonds went missing in downtown Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy.

New York Post has the original story that doesn't seem to involve any thieves, but that doesn't really exclude them does it?

P.S. In this show, seven (not seventy) billion dollars of bearer bonds have been deposited in an underground vault in Manhattan. They have been deposited by The Triplets, a righteous trio of big wheels. They make their appearance at the 10 minute mark in the Yellow episode. Since they went to all this trouble to invent these three characters, I got to wondering if there was any basis in fact. Short answer is no, but me being me, I had to poke around and this is what I found:

• Cho-Young Woo lead shareholder of Jongo, Korea's biggest private bank. He is Kim Jong-Un's nephew or cousin. In reality, Cho-Young Woo is a South Korean actor. Kim Jong-Un does have a nephew named Kim Han-sol, but he is hiding out from his uncle who is apparently trying to kill him. Jongo is a dance and musical genre from southeast Brazil. The largest private bank in South Korea is KB Financial Group.
• Suzanne Grosvenor, Lead Banker at Duncan-Welsh. The King has her on speed dial. In reality there is no Duncan-Welsh bank and Suzanne Grosvenor is an American pianist.
• Stephan Thiele, Swiss CEO of Banque Brunner, started by his great-great-grandfather in 1898. Nazi gold. In reality there is a Stephan Thiele at Deutsche Bank in Germany and there is an old Bank Brunner building in Belgium.

In 1982 the US Government made a rule that all bonds must be registered.