Why The Knick is a cut above the rest
With a brilliant director, cast, series deserves big audience for its second season
“Faith isn’t always a comfort,” says Sister Harriet (Cara Seymour) in the first season of Cinemax’s The Knick.
But as the turn-of-the-20th-century medical drama makes agonizingly clear, the developing world of science and modern medicine wasn’t much of a balm, either. Psychological and physiological pain envelop the characters in filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s second foray into TV and not even the most skilled doctor at the New York City hospital the show is named after has a prescription to assuage it.
It’s not especially uplifting viewing, but it is compelling as hell. Because for all The Knick’s blood, grit and anguish, there’s an ethereal light never far from the darkness, creating the feel of a fever dream that touches on race and class, addiction and release, gender and mental illness, life and death.
And although the series didn’t set ratings records when it first appeared August 2014, it deserves a much bigger audience when its second season premieres Friday (11p.m.) on the Movie Network. Here’s why:
The genius of Soderbergh
The man who gave us movies Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Out of Sight has said he’s never going back to the film industry and focusing instead on TV, where he can remain in neartotal control of every element of the story.
He not only directs every episode of The Knick but is also its lone editor, cinematographer and camera operator.
As a result, viewers are getting a nearly perfectly pure distillation of his vision, as well as a master class in the technical elements of storytelling in the medium. His scenes can be incredibly complex — much like director Cary Fukunaga’s famous tracking shot from the first season of True Detective — yet appear natural and effortless in their execution.
Soderbergh’s joy in the process of storytelling has never been more apparent and the audience is the chief beneficiary of the network leaving him to his own devices. Whether you’re an aspiring director or someone who just enjoys a crisply told tale, you have to stand back in awe of his achievement here.
Clive Owen has never been better
As brilliant surgeon Dr. John Thackery, Owen — who, like Soderbergh, made his mark on the silver screen — is as intimidating as he is self-loathing, and joins Deadwood’s Al Swearengen and The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano as one of TV’s most memorable anti-heroes.
When first we see Thackery in the series’ opening scene, he’s patroniz- ing an opium den and cavorting with prostitutes, and it isn’t long afterward he’s revealed to be a cocaine junkie who proudly puts his virulent racism on full display, openly denying black doctor Algernon Edwards (André Holland) a place among his surgical team despite obvious talent.
Yet, for all the loathsome elements of the character, Owen infuses Thackery with a humanity that keeps him from sliding into villainous caricature. By the conclusion of Season 1, Thackery has discovered a “solution” for his cocaine addiction — heroin, produced by the Bayer medical company and prescribed to him by rehab doctors — and he isn’t likely to find redemption in Season 2.
But he is the ugly, wart-ridden, imperfect heart of the show and the fact viewers are still invested in him is a tribute to Owen, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his work in the series.
The supporting cast
There are TV series that, in retrospect, were stocked with at-the-time unknown actors who went on to carve out incredible careers for themselves and The Knick almost certainly will be regarded the same way.
Holland, British actress Juliet Rylance, Edmonton’s Eric Johnson ( Smallville, Rookie Blue), Eve Hewson (daughter of U2 frontman Bono) and Chris Sullivan ( The Normal Heart), among others, reward Soderbergh’s casting decisions by putting in stunning performances and audiences can expect big things for them in the future.
A window into the birth of modern medicine
If ever you’re feeling dissatisfied with the current state of health care, watching The Knick will change your mind 180 degrees and leave you thankful for every advance in the field. The series demonstrates how much error there was in the trial and error of the era — one doctor’s wife suffering from postpartum depression is treated by having all of her teeth pulled — and the superstitions that served as the bedrock for many “solutions” to illness.
Soderbergh and the show’s producers have gone to great lengths to ensure historical accuracy to the plot and, for all the brutality of the human beings in The Knick, the most harsh and unforgiving character of all might well be medicine itself.