‘Rematch’ Recreates a Cultural Touchstone
A series dramatizes the 1997 chess match between a world champion and an IBM computer, a precursor of modern anxieties about artificial intelligence.It is rare that chess grabs the public’s attention — most people consider it to be too slow or too arcane to be engaging. But every now and then, the game transcends those obstacles, as it did in 2020, when Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a girl genius who rises up to conquer the game of kings.It happens with real chess matches, too. It happened in 1972, when against the backdrop of the Cold War, a match for the world championship was played in Iceland between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky. Fischer won.And it happened again in May 1997, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played a match against a black, six-and-a-half-foot tall, 1,500-pound computer named Deep Blue, developed at IBM.The last event is the subject of another television series, called “Rematch,” now streaming in Britain on Disney+. (It is not currently streaming in the United States; Disney declined to say when or if it would.) The six-part series walks viewers through what led up to the weeklong match held in midtown Manhattan and the unfolding drama culminating in (spoiler alert) Kasparov’s historic loss.Spinning a tale of human drama, corporate skulduggery, double-dealing and even espionage, “Rematch” also makes several explicit references to the attention that the match received, including by weaving in actual clips from contemporaneous news broadcasts.Though there are some fictional elements in the series, the hype was real.It was not hard to understand. The match pitted man against machine, something right out of science fiction. (In one scene in “Rematch,” characters joke about naming Deep Blue after sinister robots from “Alien” or “Terminator.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
