Why The Queen's Gambit is So Good
The Queen’s Gambit. Image courtesy of Netflix.
The Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit has gotten a lot of positive critical reviews, and it’s no mystery why. The show pays close attention to the basic building blocks of good story-telling and executes them well. And it’s an exquisite period piece with immaculate attention to detail and production design. Simple as that.
The Queen’s Gambit is the latest production from Scott Frank, who also produced the excellent Western Godless for Netflix. I was not really familiar with Frank’s work, and when I looked him up was knocked over by his resume. He has written some really great stuff, like Get Shorty, Minority Report and Logan. More recently, he’s been getting into directing and for me, has so far killed it on Netflix as a showrunner. It just goes to show that Netflix original shows can be very, very good - they don’t have to be shiny but meaningless baubles like Hollywood or Ratched, feeding the insatiable appetite of Netflix’s content machine with empty calories.
And actually I think that Frank’s work serves as a very useful counterpoint to Ryan Murphy’s Netflix shows. Because where they spend all their time and effort and budgets trying to impress with razzle dazzle, Frank focuses on the bones of good storytelling and lets them do the heavy lifting. In Ryan Murphy’s Netflix shows, you never care about any of the characters, and they often behave in ways that can only be explained because they serve the plot in some ham-fisted way. So while his period recreations of Hollywood in the 40s are delightful, for a while, eventually the charm starts to wear off and it becomes obvious that the characters and the story they are telling are hollow.
Not so with Scott Frank, and the story of this gifted but troubled chess prodigy proves it. First of all, think about the functional challenge involved in making a show that is entirely centered on chess, a game with little to no visual drama unless you are a nerd of the highest order who understands its intricacies. How do you make chess visually and narratively engaging to an audience, many of whom may not know a rook from a pawn? Improbably, the show does it. How? Well each match is staged a bit differently, using different visual and compositional techniques, so that it doesn’t seem repetitive or boring.
But the real secret is that he created a central character, played terrifically by Anya Taylor-Joy, who has the audience in the palm of her hand. Beth (not actually a real person, it turns out, but could have been given how textured her character and her story are) is a compelling figure, gaining our sympathy but not our pity. She is strong, gifted and yet has some demons making her feel like a human being who we can root for. This is what gives stakes to her matches. And that is the key to making something boring like a chess match into the focal point of a dramatic series - we care about the player.
Perhaps it stems from his roots as a screenwriter, but Scott Frank’s character work is very strong. You saw it in Godless, which like any good Western is basically a story about a self-contained little universe of interesting and fully-formed people who the audience must get invested it or else the whole thing won’t work. And he does it again in The Queen’s Gambit, fleshing out this world of competitive chess in a subtle but rich way which makes us well and truly get invested in Beth’s character arc. His commitment to investing in the bones of good storytelling - especially putting in the leg work on character development - pays off in the finished product, and this is no mean feat. Just ask Ryan Murphy.
