3 out of 5

Created by: Steven Soderbergh, Casey Silver, Ed Solomon

covers TV version, season 1

Mosaic – director Steve Soderbergh’s, producer Casey Silver’s, and writer Ed Solomon’s ‘interactive’ murder mystery – is rightfully getting praise as an experience: the story presented as an app in which the user gets to select their point of view (i.e. the character they follow) for particular scenes – though not so much to solve the murder, as the story will roll out the same way overall, but rather to see the tweaks in perception that are possible based on having different narrators narrator.  Not a new concept, necessarily, but an intriguing adaptation of technology to express it.

Over on Roger Ebert’s Demanders site, the reviewer of the TV version of the series – edited down to six episode blocks – makes sure to draw comparisons to the app to make it clear that the TV version is is not the ideal experience.  And that’s fully agreed: while the show is stuffed to the gills with great character actors, a very meaty, rural setting, and Soderbergh’s comfortably confident stand-back-and-observe shooting style, Solomon’s tale of murdered children’s book author Sharon Stone – told in the present, post the murder, and in flashback, when she takes in a volatile, wannabe-artist border (Garrett Hedlund) into her care… prrrrior to being swept off her feet by a conman (Frederick Weller) – is actually fairly standard potboiler stuff, despite that overly complicated sentence.  It’s well effected, for sure, and gives our actors a lot of room to establish themselves, but the mystery wouldn’t be as grabbing without Soderbergh’s sense of space and place, and the open-ended lack of a central point of view is obviously made more for that app than it is for sequential viewing.

It’s still worth watching, whichever way you go, even without the knowledge of the other version; the one being rated here – the TV edit – is of above average quality for sure, thanks to the talented crew at the helm, and fulfills our murder-mystery-of-the-week needs.

While I don’t see myself as ever keen on wanting a mobile experience of a show like this, I do applaud the concept, and kudos to those who did whittle the thing down into something I can watch and enjoy without tapping a screen.