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. Continue reading →