How The Queen's Gambit became Netflix's unlikeliest hit of the year

The glossy series on an orphaned girl’s inexorable rise to chess stardom is now the streamer’s most-watched scripted limited series of all time

If you were to pick, at first glance, the television hit of fall 2020, it would probably not be The Queen’s Gambit. The lush seven-part Netflix miniseries from Godless creator Scott Frank and Allan Scott, released in October, doesn’t contain the obvious genre components or zaniness of a runaway Netflix hit. It’s the adaptation of a well-reviewed if not widely known 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, a cold war period piece about an orphaned girl who is adept at chess – a cerebral and certainly high-stakes game, but not an activity renowned for its visual drama.

Related: Igniting girls' interest in chess may be great legacy of The Queen's Gambit

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3m8GuAk