Movie:The Queen’s Gambit.

 Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a female chess prodigy, has become a miniseries, premiering Friday on Netflix. It is a sports story, a coming-of-age story and a becoming-human story, and also a kind of mortal version of that popular modern genre, the inner life of a superhero, and the first thing to say about it is that it is very good — thoughtful, exciting, entertaining. Tevis was also the author of the pool novel “The Hustler,” its sequel, “The Color of Money,” and the sci-fi parable “The Man Who Fell to Earth." “The Queen’s Gambit” sits among them as a mathematical sports novel with an uncanny heroine.

It is also, in screen terms, something like a cross between “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — a lovingly decorated period piece, stretching from the late 1950s through most of the ‘60s, concerning a young woman triumphing in what was then considered a man’s game — and “A Beautiful Mind,” as an attempt to concretely represent the workings of an unusual intelligence living way out in the abstract.

The second thing to say about it is that it’s quite faithful to its source material. There has been some alteration of minor characters and expansion of major ones, for the usual reasons of exposition, but nothing out of the spirit of the story. Only a few of Tevis’ scenes are missing, and nearly all of his dialogue is spoken in the miniseries, which was developed by Scott Frank (“Get Shorty,” “The Wolverine”) and Allan Scott (“Don’t Look Now” ) and written and directed by Frank. And much that is not spoken aloud in the novel’s text is turned into speech as well.

Third, and perhaps most important, it’s about chess as chess; there is something almost audacious in making a series in which the main dramatic action involves two people at a table, moving little carved pieces of wood around, punching a clock and taking notes. Nobody is murdered, except metaphorically, in tournament play or physically assaulted or even sexually harassed, which is a little surprising, given the premise, and refreshing among lurid shenanigans that make up so much contemporary television.