THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT is a show I wanted to like a lot more than I eventually did. It sounded and looked great from the trailers: a feminist story on chess, and that recent Bobby Fischer movie with Tobey Maguire was pretty good. Indeed, the first couple of set-up episodes are really nicely handled, with good nuance and character work. But then...it just sort of falls apart a bit. The show is oddly inert, focused solely on chess tournaments and the protagonist's addiction issues, and there's little of politics either on an individual or national scale, even when the Russians are involved. Taylor-Joy is good but her character is extraordinarily limited and repetitive. The chess scenes are whizzed over, which is a shame, and there's never really much plot development after the first couple of episodes. I think the main problem, as with a lot of things, is that the same guy wrote and directed every episode. How about involving others, maybe even a few women, you know?