“The Queen’s Gambit” Wins 62 Million Viewers – – How Netflix Scored A Global Checkmate

In a rare moment of chest-pumping for the streamer, Netflix
NFLX
announced gargantuan figures for its limited series, The Queen’s Gambit.

(For those of you who don’t know what a “limited series” is, it’s also known as a “mini-series” or an episodic event that has a clear beginning, middle and finale, all in one season. Don’t ask me why they don’t call them “mini-series” anymore. Limited series = mini-series. Same thing.)

Normally, Netflix doesn’t share much data about how its content performs (or doesn’t perform) with its subscriber base, but when there’s a major story to share, Netflix makes occasional exceptions and toots its own horn.

According to Netflix, The Queen’s Gambit scored 62 million viewers, since its auspicious debut on October 23rd, 2020.

The show wasn’t just popular here in America.

It placed in the top 10 in 92 countries and ranked No. 1 in 63 countries, including the U.K., Argentina, Israel and South Africa.

Along with the staggering numbers of people who’ve consumed The Queen’s Gambit so far, it’s also worth noting that the show has been receiving tremendously warm raves, practically universally, from established reviewers and casual bloggers alike.

Media Critics and Social Media fans have swooned over the 7 episode wonder, many calling it the best piece of content released in 2020, while others refer to it as one for the ages.

The Queen’s Gambit is set in the 1960’s and features Beth Harmon, a fictitious female chess prodigy (and drug/alcohol addict) who makes an unlikely and exciting run at becoming the world’s first, female chess master.

Sounds like an obvious, monster hit, right??

It’s not as surprising a success as you might think.

Actually, like most of the “chess moves” Ted Sarandos and his team have made since wading in to original content production in 2013, The Queen’s Gambit follows a playbook already established by the premium cable networks and their elite motion picture competition.

Step One:

Take a juicy piece of Intellectual Property (I.P.) – – in this case, a novel of the same name written by Walter Tevis (1983.)

Step Two:

Get an A-list writer/director to adapt it – – in this case, Scott Frank (who penned nearly all of the episodes.) You remember Scott Frank from many movie and TV greats, most notably, his adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel, Get Shorty.

Step Three:

Locate the material in a very specific place/unusual culture – – and it’s even better if it’s set in a period, or flashes back to different eras/times. The Queen’s Gambit takes place in a whirlwind of unusual locales, as homespun as the back woods of Kentucky, through to the most sumptuous ballrooms of Moscow, with stops in NYC, Las Vegas and Paris, France in-between.

Step Four:

If possible, add some alcohol, drugs and sex addiction. Characters battling chemical turmoil almost always works, whether it’s Claire Danes in Homeland, Jennifer Aniston (and Reese Witherspoon) in The Morning Show or Amy Adams in Sharp Objects.

While there are obviously no precise or predictable formulas for Hollywood success, we’ve repeatedly seen premium cable channels, streaming services and major motion picture studios rely more and more on book adaptations about deeply flawed but in other ways, utterly exceptional female protagonists, as a fundamental source for elite content development and production.

On the feature side of the ledger, edgy book adaptations centered around brilliant but troubled women, captured audiences in recent years with film adaptations like Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011), Gone Girl (2014), Wild (2014) and The Girl On The Train (2016.)

With premium cable, high profile adaptations followed, including Big Little Lies (2017), Sharp Objects (2018) and The Undoing (2020.)

Literally all of these projects – – movies and premium cable – – are adapted by A-list talent, and they all deal with searching female protagonists, usually battling some form of addiction, struggling in a world to which few of us have access.

Enter The Queen’s Gambit, arriving on a game board already well-played by content creators and distributors who’ve provided a winning strategy for Netflix to study, benefit from and in the most flattering way, imitate.

Delving into these exotic landscapes – – whether it’s the upstairs/downstairs of Monterey, California in Big Little Lies, the Southern Gothic of Wind Gap, Missouri in Sharp Objects, or the elite, Upper East side of Manhattan in The Undoing, subscription TV is reaping great rewards by introducing audiences to closed communities (places and environments foreign to most of us) where taboo things happen.

One should add that the subject of chess, and chess itself, has long captured the attention of audiences not only in North America, but around the world.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the earth stood still whenever the notorious, unstable and quixotic chess genius, Bobby Fischer would play – – either in the U.S. or abroad.

Chess was so popular during that period that ABC included it as part of its pantheon of human competition on its flagship event series, The Wide World of Sports.

We were also stopped in our tracks, culturally speaking, when former chess master Garry Kasparov played “Deep Blue” – – IBM’s computer.

Kasparov won the first set of six games. But in the rematch, “Deep Blue” defeated Kasparov.

Our fascination of man versus machine set the table for “Artificial Intelligence” fan-fiction ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator, to recent films like Ex Machina and the Oscar-winning, Her.

Whether it’s the symbol of Death itself playing Max Von Sydow’s medieval knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, or Beth Harmon (unforgettably played by a show-stopping Anya Taylor-Joy) facing the dark, brooding Russian in The Queen’s Gambit, filmmakers and audiences can’t seem to resist the appeal of watching two obsessive geniuses squaring off against one another, ultimately only proving one thing: I’m better at chess than you are.

What does it all add up to? Maybe that single question is what fascinates us the most.

The game, with its royally named pieces from another era- – pawns, knights, rooks, bishops, queens and kings, along with its bleakly contrasting player’s tile – – has a romance, charm, elitism and mystery that is, in and of itself, timelessly and universally mesmerizing.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check out The Queen’s Gambit.

62 million is a lot of viewers, but in Netflix’s global chess game, that’s just a tiny percentage of the worlds’ audience, or players…if you’ll forgive one last pun.