Opinion / New Netflix drama The Queen’s Gambit stars Emma actress Anya Taylor-Joy and is directed by Logan and The Wolverine’s Scott Frank – here’s why it’s the best sports show on TV right now

Nov 7 , 2020

Anya Taylor-Joy plays chess prodigy Beth Harmon in Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit. Photo: Netflix

Sports Illustrated featured a chess champion on the cover in the 1970s, and 2020 might see a similar chess boom thanks to a bewitching leading lady, Beth Harmon, and a stunning new Netflix miniseries

The best sports show on TV doesn’t involve football or hockey, the NBA or MLB, or re-runs of classics.

Rather, in all its at-times glamorous but often gritty details, the stand-out exploration of competition is a period melodrama about chess set in the 1950s and 1960s, starring an actress who was previously best-known for portraying Jane Austen’s Emma.

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen’s Gambit. Photo: Netflix

The show is Netflix’s seven-episode limited series, The Queen’s Gambit, adapted from the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, and it’s a stunner. As chess prodigy Elizabeth “Beth” Harmon, Anya Taylor-Joy has become autumn’s biggest star. In the process, the actress has also lit up the chess world to such a degree that the 24-year-old talent could do for the game what Bobby Fischer achieved in 1972, when he defeated Boris Spassky in Iceland to capture the World Chess Championship, becoming the only American ever to do so.

The Queen’s Gambit is superb TV – really more of a long movie – with gorgeous cinematography, remarkable acting from a sizeable cast, a fine score from Carlos Rafael Rivera, and impeccable direction from Scott Frank. His previous Netflix series, 2017’s Godless, was also a great piece of work – a revitalising Western starring Jeff Daniels as a figure of Cormac McCarthy-grade malevolence.

Bobby Fischer plays against Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972. Photo: AP

The menace in The Queen’s Gambit is more diffuse: it’s an amalgam of Cold War-era paranoia and male privilege, the rigours of top-level chess, and Harmon’s own manifold inner demons.

Orphaned by her mother’s violent suicide (we’re led to assume that Harmon was supposed to die, too), Harmon is taken in by a Kentucky institute for girls where tranquillisers are on the daily menu and chess is played, surreptitiously, by a kindly, taciturn janitor in the facility’s Stygian basement.

From here, the plot should be predictable: Harmon becomes an obscure, tormented genius, her gifts imprisoned until a sequence of events sets her on a dramatic path to twisting destiny. Rey Skywalker, Harry Potter, King Arthur – we’ve all been here before. Harmon has her Merlin in the subterranean shadows, and later a run of heroic challenges, the most daunting being her simultaneous dependence on Librium and red wine chugged straight from the bottle.

But the marvellous, engaged acting elevates The Queen’s Gambit far above its many, many clichés. Taylor-Joy is outlandishly captivating, bringing an often wordless, physical, yet transcendent style to the role that’s equal measures intimidating and alluring, animated by a ferocious intelligence.