When Netflix streamed Bandersnatch – a standalone, interactive episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror – back in 2018, it was hailed by some as a moon-walk moment: a small step for the streaming service, which had already experimented with choose-your-own-adventure animation for children, but a giant leap for television. One fan calculated that you could watch it in 90 minutes or 46.5 hours, depending on how many byways you explored on the way to its multiple endings. Now that you could watch your own thing in your own time, the watercooler culture of television – already weakened by the decoupling from broadcast scheduling – appeared to be being dealt a fatal blow.
Five years later, the same streamer is offering Kaleidoscope, a heist series of eight colour-coded episodes that can be viewed in any order. Its boast is that there are 40,320 different routes through it. This is a calculation familiar to any campanologist who has ever thought about ringing the changes on eight bells in an old church: the Scottish bell tower of Inveraray even offers a handy diagram of the pattern it makes.
Netflix recommends that viewers watch the heist itself only after making their way through seven before and after episodes, thus reducing the permutations to a mere 5,040 (in campanology, this is known as a peal). But there is no interactivity within each episode so, by the end, whatever sequence you choose, you will have experienced the same eight-part story as everyone else.
Moreover, unlike Bandersnatch – or Geoff Ryman’s groundbreaking 1998 novel 253, which grew out of a website in the frontier days of internet storytelling – Kaleidoscope is not a fiction in conversation with its own medium, but uses familiar tropes to tell a conventional story of an underdog’s attempt to take revenge. It’s entertaining, but its most interesting aspect is the questions it raises about the limits of interactivity in legacy media such as books or television. The entwining of business imperatives and storytelling endlessly reinforces the ancient assumption that – whether narrated through flashbacks, reverse chronology or random sequencing – a story is something with a consensual beginning, middle and end. In the newer universes of video gaming (which Netflix is also buying into), different rules may apply.
Truly experimental writers, such as the British novelist BS Johnson or the French Oulipians of the 1960s, have confronted the limits. The 27 unbound chapters of Johnson’s “book in a box”, The Unfortunates, offered a possible 15.5 septillion different readings, though even he specified which to read first and last. The aim, Johnson said, was to reveal the essential solipsism of consciousness: “to see each piece of received truth, or generalisation, as true only if it is true for me …”
This is a poetic truth that Netflix is unlikely to invest in as it seeks to shore up its viewer base. As the Oulipians well knew, their structural inquiries – such as Georges Perec’s novel written without the letter “e” – were an exploration of what literature might be, rather than what it is. When it comes to ringing the changes, gamers and bellringers are light years ahead.
