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By Coren Feldman
The Queen's Gambit took the streaming world by storm over the last month as Netflix pushed its limited-series about fictional chess player Beth Harmon to its considerable audience.
Now, jumping on to a bandwagon with high expectations is always complicated and so I'd like to try to soften my reaction by acknowledging that had I not heard the hype I might have been more fond of the show. It does do a lot of things well: The show has a unique perspective, Anya Taylor-Joy is an excellent actress, the cinematic world is very vivid and the pacing is excellent. All told, The Queen's Gambit has many of the pieces needed for a good show, but it falls short of pulling them together in a way that could have turned this series into one that would have had more of a significant impact.
The first issue is, the show is kind of slow. Now, this isn't a mark against it necessarily, but the first three episodes have almost no character development and just go back and forth between her playing chess and taking pills. Yes, these are the two things we know about her, thank you show.
But all jokes aside, this is the time when we should be learning about Beth as a character and gaining the understanding into her psyche that will make her compelling further down the road as things escalate. In fact, the detail that is probably the most crucial to her character (her birth mother's death) isn't even revealed until the last episode.
The best moments for Beth's character were the ones in which she wasn't playing chess: spending time with her schoolgirls, experimenting with drugs and sex, but those scenes are so few and far between that they don't seem to have any impact on her. We spend so much time with Beth, but she feels almost like a complete stranger.
The second issue is the show's relationship with addiction. The show both glorifies Beth's drug and alcohol addiction and completely misrepresents it. There's also no real internal conflict she has that drives her to substances beyond "I was drugged up as a kid and now I need drugs to be good at chess", which, when written out, you have to admit is kind of silly. All of these elements combined make it unclear what decisions are driving her to use or not use and when, and being that her addiction is one of the main plot point of the show, it takes you out of it a little. Plus, there's the cliché end that despite playing sober (SPOILER - highlight to see text): the chess board on the ceiling was inside her all along.
The third issue is that we don't only have little insight into Beth, but there are few characters around her and we know fuck-all about them, too. There's her adopted mother, who we spend a small amount of time with outside professional chess trip settings and has no significant established relationship with Beth. There's the mostly silent janitor who we see (but barely hear) in the first episode and then get a few flashbacks of and the gaggle of men who drop into her life, one at a time, to say something kind of interesting and then leave. Finally, there's the girl in the orphanage with her who (SPOILER - highlight to see text): goes on a long rant about how they've always been family but we barely saw her in the first episode and then literally not again until the last?? That's family, Queen's Gambit writers??
There's a great moment in the show, right after Beth beats a young Russian player when she asks him what he's going to do next. He replies, I'll try again next year. She asks what he'll do if he wins the whole tournament. He replies that he doesn't understand.
He can't fathom a world where he isn't devoting all of his time and energy to chess and achieving this difficult goal. And neither has she. This is a moment that takes the characters outside of their chess bubble and reminds them that there is a life beyond, and soon. You'd think the show would have you walk away feeling that Beth has a different answer, but no. We see her play until the tournament is over. Then she plays with some people in the park. Then it fades to black.
The show was enjoyable, particularly the last two episodes, but it comes with a lot of issues that are worth discussing as we figure out where to shelve it on the tv-show bookshelf of our lives (It's 4 am good night)
Coren Feldman is the founder of CorenTV. It's actually a website, not a tv station, which I get is confusing because of the name. But you should understand that because you are currently on the website.