The Knick presents a fascinating challenge to a medium traditionally thought of as dominated by the writer.
Cinemax’s bold period piece dives into New York City at the Turn of the Century and tracks medicine’s risky turn into modernity. As conceived by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, The Knick’s premise is rich with historical intrigue and social consciousness. There's plenty of potential there, in other words, especially with Clive Owen in the leading role.
But -- as has been written about to death -- where The Knick truly stands out is unrelated to its ambitious conception or powerhouse star performance. The entire 10-episode first season is helmed (and executive-produced) by Steven Soderbergh, the eclectic Oscar-winning filmmaker who’d given up feature films just two years ago in favor of the greater freedom promised by the small-screen. While he arrived on the scene just after the acclaimed releases of eight-part series True Detective and The Honorable Woman -- superbly-directed productions by Cary Fukunaga and Hugo Blick, respectively -- his foray into series television still marks a groundbreaking moment.
For one thing, what’s made immediately clear is who’s in charge. Despite the density of the narrative, The Knick is driven in artistry and in ideas by Soderbergh. The scripts are pared-down to plot and character basics; the dialogue is unremarkable and the episodic constructions are erratic. But Soderbergh’s camera swoons in immediately to give the thing some bite. His opening scene manages gore with poeticism, and fashions characterization through aggressive editing and cinematography (both of which Soderbergh is behind, under a pseudonym). The horse-and-carriage, cobblestone vision of 1900 New York City is vibrantly rendered by a director who refuses to engage with the stuffy stoicism that so often drags even the good period dramas down. The Knick moves quickly, and it does so excitedly; credit Mr. Soderbergh, whose work should principally be described as alive.
And yet, I’m not sure that The Knick totally dismantles the notion of TV’s writer-in-chief. The writing from Amiel and Begler is historically determined and occasionally inspired, but it’s also straightforward and thin in aggregate. The show is a curious beast: at a minimum, it complicates perceptions of what should be prioritized in television viewing and criticism.
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Owen stars as Dr. John Thackery, a celebrated surgeon who fits rather squarely into that Addled Genius subgenre -- his brilliance and defiance of convention is quelled by his worsening addiction to cocaine. After Dr. Christiansen (Matt Frewer), the Knickerbocker Hospital’s Chief Surgeon, commits suicide following a procedure-gone-wrong -- a nice audience primer for the emotional stakes that come with such a profession -- Thackery is charged with taking over. Naturally, the new responsibilities and freedoms of the job exacerbate his ability-related strengths as well as his (potentially) devastating flaws.
Along with Thackery’s role adjustment, the season’s first half introduces a collection of subplots. Cornelia Robertson (Juliet Rylance), the daughter of The Knick’s Board of Directors, faces pronounced sexism as a female leader after she assumes her father’s position. There's a pair of deputy surgeons in Everett Gallinger (Eric Johnson) and Bertie Chickering (Michael Angarano), the former merely sketched out as a raging racist with a wife who's not-quite right and the latter of whom is being pressured by his father to depart for a more upscale hospital. We spend time with sleazy hospital manager Herman Barrow (Jeremy Bobb), who has put The Knick’s future in jeopardy. (He’s in debt to The Mob.) We meet Sister Harriet (Cara Seymour), who’s running a secret abortion clinic. And there’s Nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson), a quiet, non-registering beauty from West Virginia who mostly, at least in the early-going, stares googly-eyed at Dr. Thackery.
Most prominent is the introduction of Dr. Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland), a star African American surgeon who is (very) reluctantly hired by the hospital. His credentials are clear, but his relationship with the Robertson family is what gets him the job. Despite being promised the chief deputy position, Algernon is relegated to working and living in the depressingly dark basement. With spite not completely out of the equation, he secretly opens up an underground hospital in his “work space” for injured, blindly-turned-away African Americans.
There’s a lot going on in The Knick, and that feeling only mounts as the episode count adds up. But somehow, Soderbergh manages to unify everything visually and tonally. He’s aided in-part by several ripe-for-dissection storylines and a pulsating, invigorating score from his frequent musical collaborator, Cliff Martinez. And whether because of Owen’s startlingly unsympathetic portrait or the admirably confrontational words of Amiel and Begler, the way The Knick tackles racism in particular is impressively honest.
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There’s a lot of good stuff to hold onto from the outset. What the show initially, greatly struggles with is coherence. It might seem unfair to compare any show’s first season to that of Mad Men’s, but it feels especially applicable here. Mad Men, also a period piece, similarly introduced a large ensemble through separate storylines. There’d be a few arcs per episode, each as a result given time to breathe; within it, more importantly, were characters we could come to connect with more closely. The Knick fits too much in, episode after episode -- a snippet of Sister Harriet’s moral quandary here, a scene of Algernon’s thriving underground clinic there -- and consequently, the characters can’t come off the page. Given the politically progressive hue of so many of their predicaments, their individual stories get conflated with the rest like a big, subversive mishmash.
The problem both compounds and eases in the season’s second half. On the one hand, the episodic construction improves, and Soderbergh’s visual paralleling becomes more powerful in the process. But storylines drop like dominoes. You get the sense that they’ve been introduced only to be knocked down -- that the endpoint is all that was in mind. Cornelia and Algernon begin an affair around the season’s midway point; only episodes -- nay, scenes -- later, it crashes and burns after a pregnancy scare. (And guess who gets involved!) There’s no time to invest in it; its ramifications purely point to the sociopolitical realities of the time. Similarly, there’s very little interesting about Mrs. Gallinger’s descent into madness until, in the season finale, a doctor pulls all of her teeth out as a “remedy.” It's quite clever -- and is realized with haunting beauty by Soderbergh -- as it plays nicely into the series’ principal engagement with medicinal treatment and bodily abuse. (See: Thackery's addiction to a popular medicine of the time.) But it simply doesn’t justify the time it takes to get there. There are also the characters that just never take off, from Nurse Elkins to Sister Harriet. (And don’t get me started on the mob plot.)
But, the question worth asking is: how much does it matter? Some, granted, but through his lens Soderbergh tells far more compelling stories. He ultimately turns The Knick into more than the sum of its parts. In some instances there’s an explicitly-written scene that the director textures simply by holding the camera on an outside character, near-literally pulling his thoughts and perspectives out for us to contend with. There’s an undying electricity to his methods; along with gorgeous cinematography and a sustained tone, his editing is marvelous. In one moment from the penultimate episode, a dry conference speech from a colleague turns into a heartracer of a scene: with Thackery succumbing to cocaine withdrawal, Soderbergh cuts rapidly -- and I mean rapidly -- between our protagonist and the speaker, the back-and-forth so disorientingly swift that you’re practically in Thackery’s headspace. Along those lines, it should come as no surprise that the contained episode “Get the Rope” is both the season’s best and Soderbergh’s most remarkable. A race riot breaks out, and our characters’ arcs finally begin to collide. But it’s Soderbergh’s incredible focus on the physical assault on a community's dignity, and on the terrifyingly kinetic energy of the episode’s events, that sticks out. The show’s tackling of racism, procedure and assumed authority over bodies is fused into an astonishingly powerful conveyance.
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Soderbergh isn’t the only reason The Knick (mostly) works. Some actors don't quite click, including the stiff and often tone-deaf Rylance, but the series’ leads shine. Owen is fiery and emphatic as Thackery, injecting wit and intensity into a character that’s more than a little lacking on the page. As his intellectual foil, Holland is no less brilliant in his subtlety; Algernon’s anger runs deep but quiet, while his dignity is expressed by his portrayer with tremendous pride. The Knick also has intrinsic advantages, working in such a treacherous and pivotal time period. The details, especially in the nature of the medical procedures, never cease to amaze (and horrify).
The Knick presents a challenge precisely because of its imperfections. There are flaws abound here, most of them overcome by an unusual savior in TV: the director. Regardless of its other strengths, The Knick’s merit comes down to Steven Soderbergh. The season finale, which ties a lot of loose ends while opening up the show’s potential future, is an apt example. In the writing, it’s fairly predictable, occasionally unearned and never quite great. But there’s an exceptionality to it. Soderbergh’s camera flows sensuously from a toothless, mentally-unstable woman to a young girl killed in the name of “innovation.” He captures characters and their internal workings through meditative close-ups, and asserts ideas through variation in positioning and angling. There’s blood and splatter alongside character studies and historical expositions -- in that sense, Soderbergh’s work is both ferociously confident and immaculately polished.
Again, I don’t think The Knick effectively makes the argument that the director can usurp the writer in importance to a series. It may hint at that possibility, but the writing here is too weak to accurately make that claim. But in trying to be different, it succeeds, and in detailing this story through its visuals, The Knick triumphs.
Grade: B