4 w. ago
Chess Masters: The Endgame review – so dull it’s almost unwatchable
Sue Perkins does her best presenting this show that pits embarrassingly named stars like the Unruly Knight and the Chess Princess against each other but even she can’t get around the fact that chess is the least telegenic thing everAppropriately enough, I suppose, what Chess Masters: The Endgame is doing in the television schedules is a bit of a puzzle. The Queen’s Gambit, the adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel about a chess prodigy that became an unexpected hit for Netflix, made a star out of Anya Taylor-Joy and brought the game to wider public attention. But that was five years ago. The flurry of interest it roused in the subject has long since fallen back to normal levels. Chess Masters has no moment to capitalise on, except for what it assures us is “Britain’s booming chess community”, 12 of whose “rising stars” compete over eight episodes to, well, beat the other 11 at chess.This has clearly presented the producers of the show with a number of problems, none of which has b...
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