Steven Soderbergh blends two genres we never thought would mix in this new Cinemax drama, which doesn’t shy away from showing the worst of turn-of-the-century medicine.
The Knick airs on Cinemax, which alone should give you some expectation of the content. Because it’s not network television — or even basic cable — Cinemax, like HBO, has a lot of leeway in what it can show on screen. And where The Knick is concerned, that mostly means blood. Lots of blood. (Really, I can’t understate the amounts of blood.)
In The Knick, director Steven Soderbergh takes us to 1900 New York and the fictional Knickerbocker Hospital, where doctors struggle to save patients in an age bereft of what we would consider to be modern medicine. (History buffs — or anyone who can use Google — may be aware that there was a real Knickerbocker Hospital in New York at that time, but all the show seems to take from the original is the name.) The concept of the series will be familiar to most, following the tried-and-true Sherlock Holmes formula — much like House M.D., which bears a lot of similarities to this show despite the difference in era. We have an eccentric yet brilliant doctor in John Thackery (Clive Owen), a cocaine addict who needs the drug to keep functioning. The central conceit of the show is whether Thackery will be able to save the patient of the week with seat of the pants brilliance or whether he’ll succumb to his addiction — and with eight seasons of House, this is a long way from being a fresh idea.
However, while the trope isn’t an unfamiliar one, the way Cinemax and Soderbergh have packaged it has a lot of appeal. The show has all of the lush period detail of a historical drama with great sets and costumes, and time-shifting the medical drama to 1900 makes it feel like something we haven’t seen before (even though we have). The cast is superb as well, with a strand-out performance from Owen and a strong ensemble cast to fill out the hospital staff. All in all, the first episode promises a fun ride this season — and with the show already committed to making a second season, you don’t have to worry about the season ending with cliffhanger you’ll never see the second half of.
The only word of warning I have to offer about this drama is that it can be gory. Though surgical procedures performed at the hospital don’t make up the bulk of the running time, the camera does not shy away from incisions and the blood that gushes from them — if you’re not a fan, this show probably isn’t your cup of tea. But for anyone else, the show is an entertaining watch.
You can catch The Knick on Cinemax on Fridays, starting tonight at 10PM.
Now, a more detailed review of the premiere episode, Method and Madness. Spoilers below!
The episode opens on Thackery in a Chinatown drug den, where he’s woken by a nude woman — the first sign that we’re watching Cinemax — with a limited grasp of English. Looking rather disheveled, he heads out to work, catching a cab (horse-drawn, of course) to The Knickerbocker. And here’s where we get our first glimpse of Thackery’s acerbic personality: he directs the cab driver to take a longer route, and dresses him down when he suggests a shorter path. (He has his reasons: when the cab is delayed by stopping for a trolley, he takes the moment of stillness to give himself an injection of cocaine.)
Throughout this — and the entire episode — the music drives the show forward. There’s no elegant orchestral arrangements that you might expect from a period piece, but instead modern sounds with heavy beats that serve as the pulsing heart of the show — growing louder and softer, speeding up and slowing down as tension waxes and wanes. The slightly unsteady camerawork — not to the motion-sickness inducing levels of The Blair Witch Project, but notably unstable — contributes to the effect, too. Nothing in this show is stable — not even the cameras — and it gives the series a sense of nervous unease before the actors speak a single line. As much as anything else, this sets the tone of the show to follow.
This opening provides an efficient introduction to the character, who arrives at the hospital and dives straight into surgery, where he and Chief of Surgery Dr. J.M. Christenson are performing a caesarean section. It’s a procedure which they’ve tried and failed to perfect to the tune of 11 dead patients — this woman will be #12. They explain the procedure to an audience of men seated above the operating theater, with Christenson stating he believes they’ve mastered the speed necessary to successfully perform the operation.
After they make a cut into the woman’s abdomen, they continue to narrate, though it sounds increasingly harried as they rush to remove the baby and stitch up the mother before she bleeds to death. And there is a lot of blood that pours from the incision they’ve made, all the more notable due to the pristine white of the room and the robes the surgical staff are wearing. By the end of the scene, the woman, the floor, the doctors, the nurses, are all bloodied… and both mother and baby have died during the procedure.
Thackery insists that the procedure failed, not any of the doctors, but Christenson copes poorly with losing yet another patient — and returns to his office to shoot himself. This allows Thackery the opportunity to deliver a rather self-aggrandizing eulogy which seems to sum up his medical philosophy: “We now live in a time of endless possibility. More has been learned about the treatment of the human body in the last five years than was learned in the previous five hundred… I will not stop pushing forward into a hopeful future, and with every blow I land, every extra year I give to a patient, I will remember my fallen friend.”
Though Thackery clearly thinks highly of Christenson, who’s set up as a mentor of sorts to him, he’s not exactly a people person. He chastises a nurse for changing a dressing improperly by telling her to go home to Kentucky where she can treat illnesses with moonshine. When a black man applies for work with the hospital, Thackery tells him off by saying “You can only run away and join the circus if the circus wants you.” Like Sherlock Holmes and Gregory House, Thackery is an unpleasant man with few social graces who is tolerated because of his genius.
Unfortunately, the hospital is facing money problems — to the tune of a $30,000 a year deficit — and Christenson’s suicide has been bad press which hasn’t helped them fundraise. The hospital’s financial straits encourages corruption, with the Knick’s ambulance drivers threatening to beat rival ambulance drivers over which of them gets to bring a paying patient in while a health inspector bringing in tuberculosis patients demands financial kickbacks — all necessary to keep the hospital afloat. The Knickerbocker is leaning heavily on the Robertson family for financial support — and Cornelia Robertson (Juliet Rylance) is insistent that they accept the highly qualified — but black — Doctor Edwards (André Holland) on to their staff. Despite Thackery’s misgivings — and insistence that no patient will let Edwards treat them — he’s added to the staff as Deputy Chief of Surgery.
Thackery threatens to resign over the hiring, going home and not coming in the following morning — but when a patient is in dire need of surgery, a nurse is sent to find him. After pounding on his door, she climbs through a window and finds him in his bedroom, suffering from withdrawal symptoms after trying to go without cocaine… but since he’s needed, he asks her to inject him and then heads to the hospital, where he appears right as rain in surgery.
The procedure they’re perfuming this time is a challenging one, going in to fix an earlier botched surgical attempt. Because the patient has a case of bronchitis, they can’t put him to sleep with ether as they usually would. But Thackery has a plan: to inject cocaine directly into his spine, which will numb him… if it doesn’t paralyze him or kill him. Edwards calls him a madman and there’s plenty of truth to the accusation, but Thackery simply replies “Yet there is method in it.”
When Thackery succeeds, using a new surgical tool he invented for the purpose, even Edwards has to admit that there’s method to this particular madness. While Edwards had only minutes before said he would be resigning after this surgery due Thackery’s relentless needling, after watching him work he says “I’m not leaving this circus until I’ve learned everything you have to teach.”
The setup we’re left with is a strong one: there’s a solid ensemble cast established and we’ve already seen how they clash (and, sometimes, work together) in interesting ways. Though The Knick follows a formula, it’s a formula precisely because it makes for some good stories — and The Knick plays it out with great acting, high production values, and just enough of a twist to make things feel fresh. So if you’re looking for a high-stakes medical drama or a dark period drama, this may be just the show for you. Season 1 runs for 10 episodes, and will be followed by a second season of 10 more episodes at an unspecified date. You can catch it on Cinemax starting tonight at 10pm.
