This week I'm featuring
some of the 2021 Emmy winners.
I’m a sucker for stories about kids getting parental or wisdom figures in their lives. But sometimes the storytelling on these kinds of things is pretty straight ahead – the wisdom figure is quirky or unexpected but nice, and convinced pretty quickly to help, all things considered.
THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT goes a completely different way. When Elizabeth first meets Mr. Shaibel he wants nothing to do with her, and he’s kind of aggressive and weird about it. “I don’t play with strangers.” Who says that to a kid?
Eventually there’s a little thaw, as we'd expect. But it ices over again immediately when she calls him a cocksucker after he won’t let her finish a game she is destined to lose. He completely shuts her out, which is actually what really sets her on her journey. As a result of him shutting her out she spends all her time working on her chess game.
And this is the point where the standard story builds in a softening. Shaibel sees how much she's worked, maybe how much potential she has and decides to take her under his wing.
But QUEEN'S GAMBIT doesn't work that way. They play one game, he trounces her, and then he sends her off. When her play starts to surprise him, he doesn’t gush or express that in words. He invites her to play again, teaches her strategies, gives her books and eventually gets the local high school chess club teacher involved.
And that's the extent of their relationship. At the end of their arc in the pilot, the teacher asks to take a photo of them together, and Shaibel is deeply uncomfortable. It's awkward and uncertain, and yet it's really effective just like that.
To me the lesson is twofold: First, when you’re writing a relationship, it’s always good to build in a great distance for the characters to travel. You want them to have to work to get to friendship. But also second, if that distance is truly great, just a little forward movement can be enough. In fact, if you hold back you hook the audience in deeper, because we want more. When Shaibel wasn't an ongoing character of the series I was so disappointed. I wanted him to be the father figure that starts showing up to her games, giving her what her own parents could not. And refusing to give that to me only made me invest in its possibility more.
There's a great coda to this relationship arc in the finale. Hearing that Shaibel has died, Elizabeth goes back to the orphanage and discovers that in his basement office he kept clippings of every single match she played, as well as her letter to him and that incredibly awkward photo. It's absolutely devastating for her, and catharsis for us. Having withheld pretty much everything from us, writer Scott Frank has primed us to be moved by any kind of act of love. And so when we see the clippings and the photo--such a smart touch, that photo, cue the waterworks.
Now You Try
Look at the central relationship of your pilot. How far apart do the characters start emotionally? And how far do they have to travel to connect in the pilot? Do they progress too much? Too little?
What's the least amount of progress they could make and still feel like it's a step?
Play around. Maybe you'll find you've tried to force them through a whole season of growth in just one episode. And now you've got so many more stories you can tell!
