Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Anya Taylor-Joy, Film and TV, Netflix
Callum Jones
Netflix subscribers are still binging a five-year-old mini-series dubbed a 'masterpiece' by one viewer.
There's no doubt the Covid-19 pandemic was a tricky time as we were forced to isolate at homes and have minimal contact with some of our nearest and dearest.
But what got a lot of people through the tough months was binge watching a series on the likes of Netflix, Prime or Hulu - whether that be old or new.
One series that certainly got a lot of folks through the pandemic focused on fictional orphan chess prodigy Beth Harmon (played Anya Taylor-Joy), who rises to the top of her game, but faces many other battles outside of the chess hall along the way.
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I am of course talking about The Queen's Gambit, which dropped on Netflix in 2020.
The miniseries was based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis with a screenplay of the series handled by Allan Scott and Scott Frank.
Scott rewrote the story a whopping nine times and it took him around three decades to get the show produced because nobody thought people would be that interested in chess.
Nonetheless, the series was a massive hit after its release, and its interest led to a rocketing in sales of chess sets - so much for folks having no interest.
According to Netflix's Tudum, it's been viewed a staggering 112,800,000 times across the globe, while the miniseries also has a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score.
The Queen's Gambit has an impressive 96 percent critics' score on the review aggregation site, while also achieving an audience score of 94 percent.
Richard Roeper, from Chicago Sun-Times, wrote: "Raise your hand if you anticipated a coming-of-age, period-piece drama about a female chess prodigy in the 1950s and 1960s becoming perhaps the most addictive and binge-worthy series of 2020."
The New Yorker's Rachel Syme penned: "What makes The Queen's Gambit so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect."
And Nancy Durrant, from the London Evening Standard, said: "Even if you don't know your knight from your bishop it's thrilling, while the naturalistic script flows beautifully.
"Most satisfyingly, every time you think it's going to fall back on some awful 'woman in a man's world' trope, it just doesn't."
Ordinary folk agreed, with one posting on Rotten Tomatoes: "Definitely an amazing masterpiece of a show."
A second said: "Anya Taylor-Joy really killed it, and the series is just very good."
The Queen's Gambit is available to stream on Netflix right now.