I binged all of "The Queen's Gambit" in a day
Last week, Craig was away on a business trip (I KNOW) and I had the house all to myself, so I took the opportunity to take a couple of days off work, watch some bad horror movies, and enjoy having the apartment all to myself. But I ended up not watching nearly as much horror as I expected to, because I was totally drawn in by Netflix’s seven-episode miniseries The Queen’s Gambit.
An adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1984 novel, the series follows Beth Harmon (played by Isla Johnson as a child and Anya Taylor-Joy as an adult), an orphaned girl in the ‘50s and ‘60s who is discovered to be a chess prodigy; as her fame and accomplishments grow, so do her addictions to drugs and alcohol.
It can’t be easy making chess matches seem exciting and tense to chess-ignorant normies like me (it seems SO HARD), but The Queen’s Gambit does a very good job — given how many scenes there are Beth and an adversary just moving chess pieces around, it says something that I was never bored. And the series also knows when to show an entire match and when to cut away before it’s over, giving the audience credit to extrapolate what must have happened off screen.
Taylor-Joy gives a great performance as Beth, and she does an excellent job of expressing the silent analysis of the chess boards that Beth would be doing at any given moment. That said, I haven’t read the novel but the series doesn’t quite do the job of showing how Beth’s addictions are hurting her, exactly. Yes, of course addictions are bad and destructive, but nothing bad seems to really happen to her as a result of those addictions. She’s late to a chess match, sure, but later on she says her performance wouldn’t have changed even if she’d been sober. I never got the sense that Beth had reached rock bottom or that she really understood how her addictions affected those around her — it’s as though the series is saying, “her addictions are bad because addictions are bad, and she overcomes them because it’s the final episode and she needs to be over them.”
I was especially amused by how many of the main characters are British people doing American accents. Other than Taylor-Joy, there’s also charming performances from Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Game of Thrones) and Harry Melling (the Harry Potter series). Beth gets plenty of romantic interest through the series, but unsurprisingly, her true love is chess. The Queen’s Gambit is extremely watchable, and I finished all seven episodes in less than a day.
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