The new series “Kaleidoscope,” premiering on Jan. 1, is designed to be viewed in any order, with its apt seven episodes possible to scramble and remix however the viewer chooses onward of a final installment. In this way, it seems to suggest itself in form as much as premiere date as ideal for a New Year’s Day binge. A perhaps gently hungover viewer may be coddled by the answer that viewing order doesn’t matter, and, for that commercial, that pertinent information will be repeated as needed to make points clear.

“Kaleidoscope” has an unslow enough story at its center — the whirring of its random-episode beget overlays a story of a daring heist undertaken as a sort of revenge by a master criminal (Giancarlo Esposito) and his crack team. The order with “Kaleidoscope,” though, is that its design is less an ingenious way of intelligent storytelling forward than the sort of thing a creator, or a streamer, does because it can. I order it’s novel enough to have a bunch of episodes available to seek in random order (although it’s not brand-new: The aged CBS All Access launched in 2020 a series, “Interrogation,” built in a disagreement way). But it reminded me, a bit, of the George Perec fresh translated into English as “A Void,” one that in French and English both is written deprived of using the letter “E.” It’s a clever stunt, but do readers now remember the story, or simply the fact of its constraints?

Here, those constraints mean that every episode must be legible to viewers who are coming in cold: It could be their apt one. (For similar reasons, it feels as though just nearby everything about this show could be construed as a spoiler — suffice it to say that Esposito’s portray is on a mission not merely to win back cash but affection, and to harm an enemy in the process.) And I fraudulent myself yearning for the simplicity of a classically built TV pilot when apt watching “Red,” an episode that takes place the morning when the heist. The show’s attempts to convey the texture of these characters’ relationships in gleaming ways that wouldn’t jar viewers who’d already been spending time with them didn’t consistently land, and the stakes gazed at once huge — the players were in the midst of a web of crime and confusing loyalties — and nonexistent. Hoping for some backstory, my next episode was “Violet,” which Netflix’s episode descriptions indicated was set 24 existences before the heist; here, I stumbled on what may be the reason for all the sizzle and oddity of Netflix’s presentation of “Kaleidoscope.” The core delivers just isn’t very good.

In this episode, and in others I watched as the ground below my feet grew firmer and I came to understanding the story, coincidence reigned, dialogue was stilted and awkward, and settings were low-budget and diffidently filmed. (A outrageous of destructive fire in “Kaleidoscope” looked just this side of how a daytime soap grand have portrayed it — the point came across, but I request a bit more from a marquee Netflix project.) As with “Bandersnatch,” Netflix’s interactive “Black Mirror” episode, and one of the weaker entrants in that show’s canon, the device came to seem like a way to make an underbaked show favorable discussing. I wouldn’t turn people away from “Kaleidoscope” — if you consider choosing your own path through its story sounds rewarding, you’ll likely find at least a little pleasure in seeing some elements only alluded to backbone in your viewing deploy later, and seeing how some flatly stated facts are later hinted at. But I’d warn that seeing how it all fits together is vastly more fun and entertaining than the actual story here.

“Kaleidoscope” premieres Sunday, January 1 on Netflix.