After the death of her mother, nine-year-old Beth Harmon is sent to stay at the Methuen Home for Girls. There she discovers two things that will define the next couple decades of her life. The first is chess, which she learns from the Home's janitor and for which she has a prodigious natural ability. The second, rather more problematically, are sedatives. It being the 1950s, the Metheun Home uses these to keep its charges 'calm'. Even once she finally gets adopted, Beth will struggle with a tendency toward substance abuse that both facilitates and undermines her meteoric career as a professional Chess player.
It may be hard to imagine today, but in the Cold War, Chess was a big deal, with the Soviet Union's domination of the game being a running sore spot for the West. The fictitious story of young Beth Harmon feels in some respects like a version of the events in Bobby Fischer's life. Fischer was a child chess prodigy and the only non-Soviet player to hold the world championship in the entire Cold War period. Fischer was also volatile and unpredictable, much as Harmon is. Fischer also and espoused violently anti-Semitic beliefs in the latter stages of his life, which thankfully is not something Harmon seems to share.
Queen's Gambit is a well-made, well-acted period piece about one woman's struggle to both win respect in her career and to grapple with her own weaknesses. Chess is a useful narrative tool in this regard, since its relatively clean win-lose-or-draw outcomes make it easy to signal to the audience that Harmon is good at what she does. The chess that's played is actually rather good, too, and it seems to have led to a revival of interest in the game, with grandmasters like Daniel Naroditsky racking up 100,000+ subscriber counts on Youtube. My only caveat would be that Beth's proclivity for self-destructive behaviour may test the patience of some viewers.
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