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ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTICRITIC Bloomberg Pursuits January 29, 2018As You Like It
Prestige television meets the Sleep No More format
in HBO’s Mosaic. By Steve RousseauIf you know how this one ends, turn
the page. In 1969, on his commute
home, Edward Packard, a lawyer for
RCA Records, penned a story with
an inventive twist: The reader would
decide the plot turns. A decade later,
Bantam Books picked up the concept
in earnest, and the choose-your-own-
adventure craze began.
Since then the concept of an inter-
active narrative has had as many
branching paths and dead ends as its
namesake (and copyrighted) format.
Video games have evolved to feel
like participatory movies, and 2016
brought usLate Shift, the “world’s
first interactive cinematic movie.”
Since 2011 the theater production
SleepNoMorehas lured audiences for
repeat viewings by offering viewers
the chance to see new aspects of the
story each time.
Mosaic, a miniseries from director
Steven Soderbergh, is the latest, a rare
attempt in Hollywood to relinquish
control to the audience. It began as a
free app in November and premiered
on HBO on Jan. 22.
The app explores the small-town
murder of children’s book author
Olivia Lake (the slinkily excellent
Sharon Stone), a woman surrounded
by questionable love interests and
friends. The narrative is built around
15 “nodes” split among the points
of view of key characters—a con art-
ist (Frederick Weller), a handsome
lover (Garrett Hedlund), a slimy best
friend (a gleeful Paul Reubens in his
element), and a local detective (Devin
Ratray) seemingly in over his head.
The Rashomon-like tale tugs on themes
familiar to the whodunnit setup: There
are no truths, only perspectives.
Watch one node, and you’re given a
choice: Continue down the path withthis character, or switch to a new one
and gain another perspective. As you
go, you’ll unlock supplemental “dis-
covery” information in the form of
documents, web pages, and voice
mails, as well as otherstorylines you
may want to go back and explore. On
the surface, it feels as if you should
be able to hop around endlessly from
person to person, but given that each
node can be 15, 25, or even 60 min-
utes long, unraveling the mystery
of Olivia Lake can feel plodding—a
deconstructed season of television.
Scenes can repeat two or three times;
completionists, beware.
Yet something magical happens
about two-thirds of the way in: Mosaic
offers the potential that you’ll come to
the end in a way that is unique to you.
The emotional ups and downs feel like
your own creation. It’s easy to forget
Soderbergh is stringing you along.
When viewed on HBO in its six,
Soderbergh-edited episodes, it’s
clear that Mosaic’s innovations don’t
quite subvert the suspense genre.
Without choices, it’s another passive,
of-the-moment crime drama you’lleither come to love or loathe. That
basic-ness is likely a product of the
setup—to achieve the complexity of
the app’s nonlinear storytelling, the
story itself had to remain straightfor-
ward. (Similarly, Netflix Inc.’s attempt
at interactive plotting started with a
simple kid’s cartoon, Puss in Book.) In
style, Mosaic falls somewhere between
Soderbergh’s gleaming Ocean’s Eleven
and the more auteur-ish Full Frontal
or The Girlfriend Experience. It’s only
in the app that Mosaic becomes unlike
anything you’ve come to expect from
prestige TV.
In the story, Olivia Lake’s magnum
opus is a book which, read one way,
features a ferocious bear out to get a
hunter. Read another way, it’s about a
fearsome hunter out to get a defense-
less bear. Lake was so infatuated by
the concept that she constructed a
“story trail” on her property. When
two characters, Joel (Hedlund) and
Petra ( Jennifer Ferrin), visit the trail
for clues, Petra asks which way they
should take. “Well, it’s a circle,” admits
Joel, who lives on the property. “They
both end up at the same place.”