Netflix’s ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ is the best sports show on TV right now

• Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit,” a limited series about a female chess prodigy in the 1950s and 1960s, has taken the streaming and chess worlds by storm
• As Beth Harmon, Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance is threatening to set off a serious chess boom, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972 to win the World Championship.
• Chess became recognized as a sport, more than just a game, in the 1970s, and “The Queen’s Gambit” picks up on many aspects of that transformation.
• The series is also the most serious treatment of chess ever put on screen and has garnered the respect and admiration of grandmasters, fans, and current and former champions.
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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 standout 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.

The show is Netflix’s seven-episode limited series, “The Queen’s Gambit,” and it’s a stunner. As chess prodigy Elizabeth “Beth” Harmon, Anya Taylor-joy has become autumn’s biggest star and in the process 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, 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, whose previous Netflix series, 2017’s “Godless,” was also a great piece of work, a revitalizing western starring Jeff Daniels as a figure of Cormac McCarthy-grade malevolence.

A Cold War sports story, not unlike the one we’ve seen before

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

Orphaned by her mother's violent suicide (we're led to assume that Beth was supposed to die, too), Harmon is taken in by a Kentucky institute for girls where tranquilizers 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: Beth 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. Beth 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.

The marvelous, engaged acting elevates "The Queen's Gambit" far above its many, many clichés. And awaiting it, supporting it, enhancing it at every step is the relatively meticulous attention to chess detail and the overarching premise that the game is not a game. Still, an intensely competitive sport played not just by solo savants but, ultimately, by teams.

The neglected legacy of women in chess

Team Beth winds up being quite scrappy, as even high-grade US chess was in the 1960s. Her most daunting foes are, of course, the Soviets, whose Cold War chess was anything but rough around the edges. Few actual historical players are presented in the story, adapted from a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis. The reigning world champion is Vasily Borgov, a mashup of Spassky and Tigran Petrosian, with a sly touch of current world champ Magnus Carlsen thrown in (Borgov, like Carlsen, is described as a master of the endgame).

But Beth confronts plenty of rivals, all-male, along the way. Two become boyfriends, and then coaches. That might sound offensive, but it adds some helpful romantic sizzle to the depiction of a world that was certainly sexy — in a Gibsons-and-Chesterfields, Rat-Pack-in-Vegas, James-Bondish sort of way back when JFK and LBJ were in the White House — but that was also, well, full of socially awkward young men playing chess.

(A significant element, almost entirely omitted in the series, is that there was a women's pro chess tour in the 1950s and 1960s, too, with its own world champions, including five-time winner Nona Gaprindashvili, the only real-life player depicted in the series, and then only in a pan of an audience, with the voiceover acknowledgment that she had never faced the Soviet men.)

In any case, the real sizzle is in the chess, which has never been depicted better on screen.

"Searching for Bobby Fischer" had been the gold standard, but it avoided the deep intricacies of adult, professional chess. In "The Queen's Gambit," Beth completely skips kid chess and leapfrogs, in her first notable title, to top board against an overconfident Kentucky state champion (a plaintive Harry Melling). From there, it's grownups all the way, with Beth making bank, buying beautiful clothes, and fighting the pills and the booze as much as her opponents.

Taking big-time chess seriously

"The Queen's Gambit" could have covered all of this with some offhand references to the Sicilian Defense and a bunch of closeups of the pieces being pushed around the board, accompanied by furrowed scowls or smug grins from the actors. But the filmmakers instead asked former world champion Garry Kasparov and "Searching for Bobby Fischer" consultant Bruce Pandolfini for advice, to infuse the series with chess, chess, and more chess.

Not one but two variations of the Sicilian Defense make an appearance: the Najdorf and the Rossolimo, the latter a favorite of the most recent challenger for the World Championship title, American Fabiano Caruana (After an all-night bender with a Parisian temptress, Beth loses a Rossolimo Sicilian to Borgov in her first showdown with the steely Russian, played with heft and precision by Marcin Dorociński).

There's a savage joke about the Caro-Kann, an opening wielded by Carlsen in Game 2 of the 2013 World Chess Championship: Benny Watts — one of Beth's paramours, the cocky US champion with a taste for black leather dusters, jauntily played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster — says it's "all pawns and no hope."

Beth recounts a victory to her adoptive mother and quips about playing the "Marshall," shorthand for a variety of openings named from Frank Marshall, the US champion for most of the first third of the 20th century and the namesake of the famous Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan.

The Queen's Gambit of the series title also makes a crucial appearance, in a now much-discussed reference to Game 6 of the 1972 World Chess Championship, when Fischer played white and opened with moves that transposed to a Queen's Gambit Declined position and defeated Spassky in a masterpiece that put the volatile American ahead and prompted Spassky to lead a standing ovation for his opponent.

Real chess matches mingled with the storytelling

Fischer never played this opening, preferring a King's Pawn game: 1. e4, for the chess-heads. Likewise, Beth is a dedicated 1. e4 player, befitting her reputation as a flamboyant, attacking competitor who disdains draws and relishes the moment when you "break his ego" — what Fischer in 1971 told talk-show host Dick Cavett is the greatest pleasure in competitive chess.

Harmon shatters all the male egos she faces, across the chessboard and other contexts, and she breaks several hearts. But she also garners respect, a development in her character that extends beyond Netflix.

A top chess YouTuber, Antonio Radić, has already tracked down her important games from the series, as the consultants based them on real duels. And he's analyzed them as Harmon games, elevating Taylor-Joy's unexpected contributions to chess history (Vassily Ivanchuk vs. Patrick Wolff, Biel 1993 — the basis for the series' final game — might henceforth be better known as Harmon vs. Borgov, Moscow 1968).

Actual chess players, or at least their names, figure in the story. The great American player Paul Morphy comes up, as do legends such as José Capablanca alongside personalities and events only true chess aficionados would know: Reuben Fine, the Hastings International Chess Congress, the importance of 1600 Elo ranking.

Conspicuously absent, of course, is Fischer. But that's because Harmon is Fischer, in the alternate universe of the series.

Actually, with her reputation for playing "intuitive" chess, rather than pondering reams of theory, she more like a Fischer antecedent — and a player who Fischer adored: the Latvian world champion, Mikhail Tal, considered by many to be the greatest attacking player of all time (Tal drank a lot and smoked a lot while he devised devastating combinations, piece sacrifices, and otherworldly checkmating maneuvers, but unlike Harmon, who overcomes addiction, he embraced his demons and died at 55.)

No need to search for Bobby Fischer

We don't end up searching for Bobby, however. Beth is outlandishly captivating, and Taylor-Joy brings an often wordless, physical, yet transcendent style to the role that's equal measures intimidating and alluring, animated by a ferocious intelligence. As a competitor, Harmon is obsessed. So the second half of the series focuses on how her individual intensity is transformed into a team effort.

This is where "The Queen's Gambit" nails big-time chess. There might be just two players at the board, but there are squads behind each side, and for the Soviets in the 1960s, that was a national advantage. All the finest players in the world worked together to elevate the finest among them, and in the series, Borgov doesn't spend time alone: he huddles with his seconds, plotting, and planning.

Harmon is a one-woman army, at least chess-wise, until the final episodes (she receives considerable support, emotional and financial, from the best performer in the show, Moses Ingram as Beth's best friend from the orphanage, Jolene; Ingram steals every scene she's in).

First, Benny transports her to his grim basement apartment in New York to partake of la vie bohème and undergo a serious training regimen only briefly interrupted by the hot sex we all knew was on the agenda.

Then, with Harmon staring down a second defeat by Borgov, this time in Moscow while all Russia watches, Benny and Beth's original romantic fixation, a chess journalist named Townes, organize a transatlantic team of informal seconds who use a long-distance call during an adjournment to devise a winning line. (When Borgov doesn't cooperate, Beth has to summon all she's got to find victory without the Librium and the vin rouge.)

Adjournments are gone, but this is how the world's chess elite manage their encounters. Carlsen and Caruana didn't saunter into London in 2018 and battle for the World Championship as independent operators. Both had grandmasters in their camps and months of preparation behind them, and the best computer chess analysis engines money could buy helping them break down each others' strengths and weaknesses.

"Do you know why they're the best players in the world?" Benny asks Beth of the Soviets at one point in their training sessions.

"Because they have the best suits?" Beth counters, still dismissive of the notion that she needs anyone else to beat Borgov.

"It's because they play together as a team," Benny says, with a severity that verges on mansplaining. But Beth knows he's right.

Beth Harmon is a contender

Without these extras, "The Queen's Gambit" still would have been exhilarating. Still, it might not have snared the admiration of the serious chess community, which is used to the game being reduced to a caricature of the intellectually complicated and physically demanding throwdown it often is, with grueling contests that extend past 100 moves and leave both players slumped in their chairs.

Chess folks are also well aware of how much the game has evolved in gender roles since the 1960s. Hungary's Judit Polgár made a habit during her serious playing career of taking out top-ranked men, included Kasparov, and Irina Krush just won her eighth US Women's Championship. Two-time US women's champ Jennifer Shahade, with Yasser Seirawan and Maurice Ashley, is a member of the best chess commentary team this side of "Monday Night Football" in its heyday.

Ultimately, the beautiful achievement of "The Queen's Gambit" is that it evokes the 1960s and 1970s period when chess had been elevated to the same plane as more recognizable sports, with Fischer making the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1972. Beth lands in Life magazine, but her character is both better than Fischer — and worse.

Like Fischer, famous for his collection of bespoke suits, Beth adores good clothes and outdresses the competition. But unlike Fischer, Beth needs the pills and the wine to arrive at what she calls a "cloudy" state to play at her best (she eventually adds cigarettes to the cocktail).

What prevents "The Queen's Gambit" from becoming "The Karate Kid" with knights and rooks instead of "wax on, wax off" and crane kicks is the exceptional woodpusher detail combined with Harmon's rise, through a system stacked against her, to become if not world champion, then a threat to the world champion, a reason for Borgov to both applaud and lose sleep at night.

She's a contender, and like any great athlete in sports, she leaves the fans wanting more. And they might get it if Netflix pursues a second season. Fifty years ago, Fisher set off a chess boom that, in his words, welcomed everyone: men and women, young and old. How interesting it would be if Beth Harmon encourages a new boom, and more women than ever set their sights on the big time.