Plotting director Steven Soderbergh's latest project—an interactive smartphone app called Mosaic—required covering most of the walls in a Chelsea loft with color-coded cards and notes. The app contains a 7-plus-hour miniseries about a mysterious death, but because viewers have some agency over what order they watch it in and which characters' stories they follow, each scene—and the point at which it should be introduced—had to be meticulously planned so that no detail was revealed too late or too soon. The script for it is more than 500 pages long and was written after most of the story was laid out using all of those notecards. Soderbergh and his team have been working on it for years. Turns out it takes a lot of work to overhaul TV as we know it.

Mosaic, which is available today for iOS devices, started out of frustration. Soderbergh was getting increasingly annoyed with the Hollywood system and starting to realize the general structure and grammar of what a film looked like hadn’t evolved in decades. At the same time, Casey Silver, the former head of Universal Pictures, was trying to develop a new way to tell stories. In the summer of 2012, when Soderbergh was promoting Magic Mike, Silver approached him with a fairly rudimentary idea to use the technology available through smartphones and apps to let viewers interact more directly with the characters they were watching. Soderbergh was interested, but wary—he didn’t want to do anything that felt "game-y." But they kept talking and soon, the director says, “it very quickly evolved into something that went beyond what the original concept of what this thing was, and more into the territory where we ended up.”

Where they ended up was a smartphone-enabled story, developed and released by Silver’s company PodOp, that lets viewers decide which way they want to be told Mosaic’s tale of a children’s book author, played by Sharon Stone, who turns up dead in the idyllic ski haven of Park City, Utah. After watching each segment—some only a few minutes, some as long as a standard television episode—viewers are given options for whose point of view they want to follow and where they want to go next. Those who want to be completest and watch both options before moving on can do so, those who want to race to find out whodunit can do that too. Because each node, filmed by Soderbergh himself, feels like a TV show, launching Mosaic can be akin to sneaking a quick show on Netflix while commuting to work or waiting on a friend; but because it’s long story that’s easily flipped through, it can also enjoyed like the pulpy crime novel on your nightstand, something you chip away at a little bit at a time before bed. It’s concept isn’t wholly original—Soderbergh himself notes that "branching narrative has been around a long time" (the most obvious analogue is a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but Soderbergh cringes at that analogy)—but that it finds a way to appeal to both fans of interactive storytelling, and people who just want to watch some decent TV.





1 / 5 Chevron Chevron Courtesy HBO

That’s by design. When Silver and his partners—one of whom is UCLA psychiatrist Dan Siegel—originally developed their idea in the late-1990s/early-2000s, it was a fairly broad concept about telling stories by getting into the minds of characters. The tech necessary to do what they wanted didn’t even really exist yet. A decade later, it did. And when Silver brought it to Soderbergh he thought it looked like “a bunch of schematics that, to me, were very steam-powered.” But he saw the potential and they started working with screenwriter Ed Solomon (Now You See Me) on a prototype of a branching narrative piece of Soderbergh’s design called The Departure. It was a very simple story—the director shot it in one day, and even if users went down every possible path the whole thing was only 15 minutes—but it proved there was something viable in what they wanted to do. “I gotta say,” Silver says now, “[Soderbergh] put it on his back and evolved it enormously from what we brought him to where we are at this moment.”