"The Queen's Gambit" made chess reachable even for people who've held a queen maybe twice in their lives.
Certain works of art gather an invisible cloud over them. It opens without warning, and rarely at a convenient moment.
You can try to see it coming, but no amount of expertise guarantees it. Art outlasts us, and everyone's key to it is different.
The odds of making chess interesting to everybody are slim, and yet the people behind "The Queen's Gambit" got it within reach even of someone like me, who's held a queen maybe twice in his life.
We're given, in something like documentary form, the most gifted chess player in the world. Where the truth stops and the invention starts is for you to sort out. The script is presumably built on the life of the prodigy Bobby Fischer, but changing the sex of the central figure turns the whole picture over, and at that point the facts stop mattering.
And who cares whether it happened. What got me first was the nerve of it, and the eye — and, at the same time, the warmth and the balance mixed into it. I'd worked out the trick of how it develops by about halfway, sadly.
It didn't make the show dull, or the experience any smaller. It all came together well enough to settle the question of whether I can live without art. It feeds me, and without it I can't breathe properly.
Based on Walter Tevis's 1983 novel; became Netflix's most-watched limited series at the time of release.
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