Your move: ‘Queen’s Gambit’ offers viewers more than good chess

“The Queen’s Gambit” is an anomaly in our pop culture Tower of Babel. At a time when television audiences seldom speak the same language – we’re all watching different shows and subscribing to different streaming channels – the Netflix miniseries about fictitious chess prodigy Beth Harmon feels like a lingua franca. The world hasn’t paid this much attention to the game since American Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky of the USSR in 1972. 

What makes “The Queen’s Gambit” a universally resonant crowd-pleaser is that