This review by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker hits on why I have found Cinemax’s new show The Knick to be a disappointment:
In recent interviews, Soderbergh has seemed disenchanted by movies, financially and culturally: TV audiences, he has argued, are more open to character complexity, to ambiguity and risk-taking. It’s all the more disappointing, then, to report that Soderbergh’s first post-“Candelabra” TV venture, the period hospital drama “The Knick,” colors inside the lines. Rather than innovate, the series, on Cinemax, leans hard on cable drama’s hoariest (and whoriest) antiheroic formulas, diluting potentially powerful themes. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, “The Knick,” which was written by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, is about the Knickerbocker, a hospital that treats the city’s poorest immigrants, with a board of directors made up of wealthy philanthropists. At the Knick, a brilliant, drug-addicted, brothel-frequenting doctor—John Thackery, played by a beetle-browed Clive Owen—is poised to push modern medicine forward, from C-sections to skin grafts. The surgical-history material is rich stuff, but the series itself is dour and hokey, full of stock characters and eye-rolling exposition. Designed to flatter rather than to challenge the viewer, it’s proof that even an ambitious director can’t overcome a blinkered script.
[Emphasis added.]
Via techtimes.com
The show started off with a truly amazing opening sequence—gory without quite seeming exploitative, and evocative of an unfamiliar time. It seemed clear that these doctors (Matt Frewer and Clive Owen) knew what they were doing, but only up to a point. In performing a C-section on a woman in severe distress (a placental abruption, as I recall), they were conducting an experiment, and the experiment failed. That failure, we soon learned, had a serious cost.
The show therefore opened by presenting a world that we, sitting here today with comparatively easy access to modern medicine (assuming, of course, one has health insurance and the cash or credit for the co-pay), cannot understand, where many of the treatments we take for granted were still cutting-edge, or even purely experimental, and where merely getting electricity was an extravagance. The promise of those first 10-15 minutes, however, never materialized.
The show has an amazing opportunity to challenge many of our assumptions about how we got to where we are. How many people died on turn-of-the-century operating tables under the care of doctors who were masters of their trade, but knew almost nothing of what even laypeople know today? Just how corrupt was the business of medicine? We only get a peek into that aspect of this world. How entrepreneurial was it? We see the competition among ambulance drivers, and the willingness of at least one health inspector to ignore his duties if it pads his wallet. Don’t think for a second that none of that happens today—it just probably doesn’t happen with bat-wielding Irish immigrants quite as much anymore. As Nussbaum said, though, it looks like The Knick has no intention of challenging its viewers that way.
The characters are about as frustrating, with little promise for real development. The quote above mentions Clive Owen’s Dr. John Thackery, but a few other characters stand out as (so far) missed opportunities for character development. A few also pose the question of what purpose they serve to the show’s narrative. The most obvious is Dr. Algernon Edwards (played by André Holland), who had a brilliant medical career in France and England, but who is stuck in the basement of the Knickerbocker because of his race. The nurse, Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson) recently moved from West Virginia to the big city, and now shares the secret of Dr. Thackery’s drug addiction. Either character has great potential as one sort of outsider or another adapting to this world, but I’m not holding my breath. Dr. Edwards’ plot lines in particular have been disappointing, seeming to fall into the well-worn and lazy tropes of “look how racist the world used to be!!!”
Via techtimes.com
Via attheknick.tumblr.com
There’s also the corruption of the hospital administrator, Herman Barrow (Jeremy Bobb), but so far I just can’t get myself to care about him or his problems. He’s not even remotely likable as a character, and the show hasn’t managed to link his fortunes (or lack thereof) to those of the hospital with any sense of real urgency.
The ambulance driver, Cleary (Chris Sullivan), is a burly, bearded Irishman prone to stereotypical drunkenness and violence. He appears in every episode, but after the first few episodes, it’s still not clear if he is there just to show another aspect of the medical profession circa 1900, if he serves a bigger purpose to the story, or if he is some unsuccessful attempt at comic relief. (I’m not sure why I even think Cleary would be comic relief at all, except that he seems like such a blatant stereotype.)
Then there is the setting. They went all-out, as far as I can tell, designing and building the world of New York City in 1900. It is grim and dismal, as I’m sure it is intended to be, but it is also strangely sterile, and not in a hospital sense. They must have spent their entire budget on set design and props, leaving nothing for extras, because so far, the New York City of The Knick is remarkably devoid of people. According to NYC’s own historical demographic data, the city’s population in 1900 was 3,437,202. Of that total, 1,270,080 were foreign-born. The city seems awfully empty, though. I realize that it must be colossally expensive to clothe extras in period costumes, and that the producers can’t exactly use the city’s existing infrastructure as a backdrop, but then, period dramas are just expensive all around.
One might have hoped that Dr. Thackery’s line, delivered near the beginning of the first episode and featured prominently in much of the show’s marketing, would set the tone for the series: “We have learned more about the human body in the last five years than was learned in the previous 500 years.” So far, it has not.
