Like the rest of us, I’ve been watching a lot of TV. I’ve mostly streamed stuff. As I was looking through the Netflix menu I saw The Queen’s Gambit. I said to myself this looks interesting, if Biden wins I’ll watch it. That night I watched The Chicago 7. It’s was very good, and quite entertaining. I admit it irked me that there was no mention of the song Chicago by Crosby, Stills and Nash. The TV version staring Elliot Gould played that song during the end credits. But we aren’t here to talk about that.
So a few days ago as a present to myself I started watching this series. Ha, I watched the whole thing in one sitting. And I watched it again the next day. And I watched some of the episodes twice after that. I couldn’t stop.
When a TV series has me so engaged and talking to myself like I was doing, I knew it wouldn’t stop until I wrote this. It happened to me before with the series “The Americans”. Albeit for different reasons. Thinking of that show still has me seeing red.
Oh, before I forget, please don’t read this until you’ve seen all 7 episodes. I’m not going to edit myself. Even though I contend I could tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about every episode and it wouldn’t matter, because it’s how it was done. And the acting. It’s flawless. Even in my scorching review of “The Americans” I thought the acting was superb. So, here we go.
At it’s heart it’s a coming of age story. A young girl named Elizabeth, but she insists on being called Beth, is living in an orphanage. She develops a friendship with another girl named Jolene, as well as a custodian named, William Shaibel, who then teaches her how to play chess. And she becomes acutely aware that at a very young age she’s quite good at it. All of age nine she looks like a poor waif as she wanders in a room full of high school chess club guys and beats them all with one brain tied behind her back.
At one point she get adopted by a couple, the father figure is away a lot until he’s never there at all. Beth and her mother develop a bond, then become a team. Her mom is what you might say a very lenient team leader.
There are four story lines we are screaming at the series to tell us more about. They are the story of Jolene, Mr. Shaibel, her birth mother, and her adoptive mother. We want answers, but the series isn’t the least bit interested in telling us much about them. They leave it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions. Which is a shame, especially when it comes to Jolene. Jolene is our only link to the real outside world we have. She is where stability and sanity live in this story. I understand this series was a novel, and a short one at that, 243 pages, so maybe the author Walter Tevis didn’t get into it either.
Through cinematography the series does a great job of depicting the dreamlike world the chess players reside in. Everything looks sexy, and stylized, even the ugly parts. It almost looks like a Doris Day movie beautifully unreal and romanticized.
Beth and her mother travel the U.S., then Mexico going from tournament to championships, and winning, and losing a bit too. One of the biggest losses for Beth happens in Mexico City where her adoptive mom dies. Now she’s all alone and getting to be kind of a train wreck.
Beth furthers her descent into the abyss when she blows an important match in Paris, even though she was well trained by her rival/ archenemy/antagonist friend guy named Benny. And I’ll talk about him later. I have a whole thing on Benny coming up. Benny is...he’s...perversely likable. he’s complicated, and made even more so by the makers of this series.
Beth does somehow manage to overcome her life and beat the world champion chess grand master in Moscow. And by the end of the series she smiles differently and plays chess with an old man in a chess park in Moscow, just for the fun of it. And you worry about her no longer.
And that’s what the story is about.
The production is lush and lavish, The costuming is spot on. At one point her adoptive mom buys her some new cloths. She buys her a cool coat. But the stupid high school kids laugh and make fun of her, so she balls it all up and throws it in her locker. You’re in shock because it’s a hipster coat. High school kids today would go mad for it. And it’s lined.
The writing is sharp, smart and crisp. The characters are compelling and engaging. This is one of those series that grabs you from the get-go and doesn’t let you leave until it finishes telling you it’s story. At times it’s as taught and suspenseful as a psychological thriller.
One of the things I really appreciated about this story comes when Beth is playing at a university for the U.S. Championship. Beth and Benny and two others are in the student union and Benny asks her to play. First Beth says no, she just came in to get coffee. Benny says well we could play something else. And he rattles off three silly board games that were around then. Oh I forgot to tell you this story’s timeline is approximately early 50’s to 1968. Johnson is still president when this story ends, but it is at least the fall so he doesn’t have much more time as president.
Anyway, as I was saying Benny’s comment brings up the fact that at the time there weren’t a lot of fun yet challenging board games, not like today. I wonder what those characters would have thought about Settlers of Catan, or Ticket To Ride, or Pandemic, or Time Stories?
I recommend you take the time to watch this. It’s a fun ride...However…
There is one huge flaw in it for me.
This story resides in the world of chess. And the writers seemed to love the fact it’s about chess. And this story loves the ritual of chess. It loves the names of the defenses, the moves , the plays, the hierarchy, the players mannerisms, the little slips of paper, the clocks, sit this way, shake hands that way, do this, don’t do that, how a game is adjourned. What’s written on those little slips of paper with the envelopes? It’s very ritualized. When it comes to ritual there’s the Catholic Church, the military, and one notch below that is the world of chess. And it seems that the ritual of chess is well liked by the players. They seem to get off on it. I think it brings out the diva in all of them. In watching this series you get the feeling a chess players life is highly regimented and mannered.
This story loves all that stuff. Which is fine.
What’s not fine is the fact that during game play it keeps you at arms length. You aren’t allowed in. You can never play along. You can never see the board the way the players see it. You’re always looking at the board through Hitchcockian angles. If you do see an above head shot of the board, it zooms by so fast you can’t tell what’s going on. You always have to just take the characters word for it. The end result being you don’t care about the game of chess at all. They could be playing chess or they could be playing The World of Smog: On Her Majesty’s Service. My guess is it’s done on purpose to accentuate chess’s mystique. But it doesn’t do that. Because as I said before chess isn’t the only game in town anymore. Take a look at BoardGameGeek some day. If anything, those antics make that fact worse. It puts chess in the Fuddy-duddy category. There is a game called The Virgin Queen. It lives in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It takes a couple hours just to explain it. It’s played in 4 rounds if I remember correctly. And it takes about 8-10 hours to play. So take that chess.
You get the feeling this series wants you to get out your chess board and play along, but it hamstrings you from doing that. And those weird camera angles become an annoying tic the series has.
And it stays that way to the very end. You think OK she’s playing the last game, can we please see what’s going on? Nope. It’s like looking at a route from San Diego, California to Detroit, Michigan on a map made of Swiss cheese.
The filmmakers made a big deal about the games being real games, and the moves being real moves, but if you look at the games played in this series, what difference does it make? You can’t see the whole move anyway. You just end up being forced to notice how sexy it all looks.
It made me wonder, what if the game of chess was invented in the 70’s in the U.S? And the names of the pieces were the president, the chief of staff, the press secretary, the Pentagon (Joint Chiefs), the CIA/FBI, and the press? Would the game hold the same mystique? Would it be so ritualized? Do the names of the pieces themselves caused the world of chess to exist as it does? Do the names of the pieces get in the way of more people being good at it? Should a beginner quit thinking about the names of the pieces, and just think, look, this is a piece that moves this way, this piece moves this way, and so on? Would it make it easier to learn?
Anyway you can’t play along with the game, and it teaches you nothing about game play. In the end chess is merely the window dressing.
I’m not done. Another annoying flaw.
How in the world do you talk about that time period without even mentioning Bobby Fischer? I know he was an asshole but still? How do you mention Boris Spasky without Bobby Fischer? It’s like mentioning John McEnroe without Bjorn Borg, or Billy Jean King without Bobby Riggs, or Lennon without McCartney, or Yo without Yo. I know that the Benny character was supposed to be loosely based on Bobby Fischer, but Benny is not Bobby. There’s not an ounce of psychosis in Benny at all. Nope, I don’t give the series a pass on that one. Especially since “Almost Famous” Stillwater was supposed to be loosely based on Led Zeppelin, yet they still mentioned Led Zeppelin in the story. Sorry TV series I give you no quarter on that.
Minor Quibbles.
Chess players or not, at some point in this time period you are going to be introduced to the counter-culture. There’s no mention of it at all. As far as this story is concerned it doesn’t exist. Nor does the Vietnam War for that matter. The characters all listen to Top 40. No one has ever heard of Hendrix. At some point Beth goes to San Francisco. She might as well have gone to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Nobody except for Jolene know what’s happening in the world. Beth lives in Lexington Kentucky. No one in this story that lives in Kentucky cares or even mentions the Kentucky Derby. You would think the mother would have at least mentioned mint juleps, or bourbon, but nope.
The show could have done with a pinch more blatant humor. Just a pinch. There is humor there but it’s very subtle. The series sets up the joke but you have to provide the punchline. Which is fine, I don’t mind a challenge. But a few more obvious laughs could have gone a long way to make even the really likable characters more likable. As well as lightened the heavy load of this series. It’s like they forgot to check for seasoning at the end before serving the stew. I think one of The West Wing’s finest achievements is the ability to blend farce with pathos. This show had all the pathos it could handle, it needed a tiny touch more farce. Benny was the only character who had any chance of being able to laugh at himself. Maybe because he is the only chess playing character that’s comfortable in his own skin. Which brings us to Benny...
The best part of this whole series for me is Benny. Every time I think about him it makes me smile. He’s the brightest part of this whole adventure.
How in the world did David Spade get a hold of Doc’s Brown’s DeLorean go back in time and grab is younger self to be in this series? Who knew he had such clout? I suspected he had the acting chops. I always thought he would make an interesting villain.
One of the reasons you can’t buy the Bobby Fischer act is the fact Benny looks just like David Spade. And he acts just like a David Spade character would act if that character was a chess genius. And what’s even more delightfully absurd is the Indiana Jones/Inspector Gadget/Billy Jack outfit he wears, constantly. And what is surprising is, it all works. Bobby Fischer vanishes in thin air from all of that. Thank God. And I smile at the series for making Benny what he is.
And he’s the only male character in the series that is sexy. They allowed his character to be sexy.
And he is sexy. his voice is sexy, his teeth are sexy, his air mattress is sexy. He has sexy coming out of is ears. You just know as soon as he appears in the story he and Beth are going to be involved in some extracurricular activities. There’s instant chemistry between Beth and Benny, it cascades out of the TV. Which makes Beth and Benny’s chess games all the more riveting. The sex just oozes out of the both of them onto the chess board and beyond. It’s like watching...yes that, and they nailed it. And stuck the landing. And yes their relationship does mimic a chess match.
Aside from that though, Benny has real genuine feelings for Beth. He respects her, and her ability as a chess player. And he treats her as an equal. Someone with the capabilities of achieving what he did. Even before he coaches her, or has sex with her. He knows how to coach her for her big event. They speak the same language. Another guy in the story tried to coach her but he failed.
As Jolene was the source of sanity and stability in this story. Benny was indeed Beth’s Chief of Staff. He was in charge of keeping Beth’s demons out of her hair while he coached her. And it worked until she left for Paris alone.
They do break up after Paris, because Beth devolves into a walking disaster area . And he’s hurt by that, and tells her to leave him alone. But in the end Benny, along with the other guys in this story help Beth to defeat the Russian. The other thing that makes him so attractive is that along with Mr. Shaibel, he and Jolene are the only characters that don’t have their psyches all tied up in knots.
Other people have called the Benny character a distraction. He wasn’t a distraction, he totally demolished the Fourth Wall. He blew it to smithereens. I would watch 7 hours of Benny and Beth argue about banana bread.
There is a deeper thing going on with those ridiculous cloths though. Benny is always wearing that attire. But he is hiding in it. By the end of the series he’s not. He doesn’t have to hide, he found his mate.
Beth had to gather up all the puzzle pieces of her life and put them together so she could throw the anger, hurt, and guilt away to be the master of her own fate, instead of a victim of circumstance. Her whole demeanor changed at the end of the story. She’s smiling honestly, gleefully, and freely for the first time in her life. Knowing she can make decisions on her own without first checking to see if it’s OK with one of her discarded demons. She bounds her way to that chess park in Moscow looking like a victorious chess queen.
You just have to see it. So go see it.
Just know, you aren’t going to learn anything about how useful the Sicilian Defense is by watching it. Even if death is on the line.