The Queen’s Gambit: Writing the Limited Series

The Queen's Gambit: Writing the Limited Series Today we're going to be talking about The Queen's Gambit by Scott Frank and Alan Scott. This is actually the first time since Chernobyl that we've looked at a limited series. So, I want to talk a little bit about limited series, how they work, and also how they've changed over the years. I actually came up in the world of limited series (or miniseries, as we used to call them). Back in those days, when we thought about a project that could become a limited series, we thought about giant, sprawling, epic stories with a tremendous amount of plot-- so much plot, so many subplots, so many twists and turns, so many characters, such huge historical scope, that you couldn't fit it into a movie.  When we thought about miniseries, back in the day, we were looking for stories about topics that people already had a feeling that they knew about, but that maybe they didn't know the real story. Something really big, because miniseries were expensive and hard to sell and hard to make. The truth is, until very, very recently, we were looking for stories a lot more like Chernobyl than The Queen’s Gambit.  When you look at The Queen's Gambit, you see that shape, scope and structure when writing a limited series (or miniseries) has completely changed.  The Queen's Gambit actually started as a novel. It bounced around Hollywood for about 30 years. And the first adaptation as a feature film was written about 10 years ago. And although it was written by the same writer, Alan Scott, who would eventually pen the limited series, they simply could not sell it. In fact, the response they kept getting when they pitched it was “nobody's going to be interested in chess! This story is too small.” It wasn’t until after doing Godless that Scott Frank came up with the idea to reimagine The Queen’s Gambit as a limited series.   And what’s really interesting is that they conceived of it not as one of those traditional, epic, plot driven, historical limited series that had always sold in the past. But instead as a much quieter approach to a limited series, that really allows you to drop into the eyes of a character.  Back in the day when I was coming up in the industry, if you pitched The Queen's Gambit as a limited series, you would have been laughed out of the room.  There are many things about the structure of The Queen's Gambit that simply shouldn't work according to Hollywood convention. And yet today, it’s become the most popular limited series in Netflix's history. So, today I’ll be talking about what’s unique and original about the structure of The Queen’s Gambit, and how these filmmakers flew in the face of the traditional Hollywood wisdom to make something that was greater than the sum of its parts. When you look at the elements of The Queen's Gambit, they don’t exactly suggest a blockbuster movie, much less a successful limited series.  It's about chess, which unlike football, or baseball, or any of the other typical sports about which movies get made, is a sport that nobody knows anything about!  It’s a sport that you can't follow unless you’re an expert. Which makes it really hard to cheer for the character like you would in a football movie. You don't even know where the end zone is! Unless you’re Bobby Fisher, you can’t even look at the board on screen and realize “she’s got it! Checkmate!” The Queen’s Gambit is essentially a sports movie that's not a sports movie. A movie based around a game where the audience can't tell if you're winning.  You also have another really interesting thing going on, which is a character, who, for the most part, doesn't form relationships.