Going into watching the show, all I had heard was that the show was:
- Very well done
- About chess
I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from a show about chess, and I myself have only played extremely casually. Regardless, I found the first episode to be incredibly engaging! The show so far is incredibly well done (as I was told), and music/sound design helped to punctuate important events throughout, which resulted in an added dimension to the experience. Something that I found to be kind of funny was the significant lack of explanation on how to play chess as Beth began to learn. The show put forth a lot of effort to showcase her incredible observational powers, allowing her to absorb the rules of the game, but key concepts (such as how to win) were not emphasized explicitly, making it unclear how she derived such rules. This particular point does nothing to detract from my experience however, as the show was fantastic and I look forward to watching more!
I think that it is very interesting that they did not discuss how she learned and was taught the rules. I know from experience from trying to learn how confusing the rules are!