Steven Soderbergh’s HBO miniseries Mosaic is a brilliant upending of storytelling convention

The A.V. Club

“Soderbergh’s formal mastery is long-established, but what makes this new miniseries especially good is how it uses the framework of a standard-issue mystery to interrogate our understanding of storytelling conventions,” says Alex McLevy. “More specifically, the entire concept of our own vision and command of facts as a deeply fallible enterprise, one in which there are no easy answers—or possibly any answers at all. He lingers on faces long past the point when characters have ostensibly received useful intel. He shifts focus from the person talking to the back of another person, pulling our attention away from the conversation and into the realm of pure body language. And his camerawork executes hard cuts to small, seemingly insignificant details that drew the eye of someone in the scene."

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• Mosaic doesn’t look like a show first envisioned an “interactive” TV experiment for your devices
• Viewers may wonder if the app presented a more effective version of the HBO miniseries
• At its core, Mosaic isn’t something wildly new: “It just happens to place as much importance on its blank spaces as the ones that are filled in fully”
• Sharon Stone was an inspiration for her role -- in fact, her character’s original name was “Sharon”