Steven Soderbergh’s new Cinemax series The Knick , starring Clive Owen, is a gorgeous medical drama about when surgery was more like butchery.
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Eric Johnson, Eve Hewson, and Clive Owen in The Knick
Mary Cybulsk/Cinemax
On the heels of his delightful HBO Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra last year, Steven Soderbergh officially quit filmmaking — at least temporarily. And right after that, he signed on to make The Knick, his first television series in more than a decade, a period medical drama set in New York City in 1900 that premieres on Cinemax this Friday, August 8.
It's the kind of move that's commonplace these days. As Hollywood focuses on building giant genre franchises, the small screen has become a much friendlier place if you want to make dramas for adults. We're long past the days when TV was treated as the redheaded stepchild of the movies — now all kinds of cool kids, from David Fincher to Jane Campion to Cary Fukunaga, are trying out serial storytelling. Cinema may be consumed with superheroes and young adult adaptations at the moment, but there's always the warm embrace of cable.
Soderbergh's always been the coolest kid of all when it comes to experimenting with new things such as shooting on digital, day-and-date releasing, and, now, making the first prestige drama on a channel that not so long ago was synonymous with late-night softcore. Below, BuzzFeed's film critic, Alison Willmore, and feature writer, Anne Helen Petersen, discuss how the show will change everything you think you know about period dramas.
Alison Willmore: The thing I love best about The Knick is how little it owes to any other show on air right now in terms of its look — or any typical period drama. It's shot with natural light and fluid camerawork that follows characters through the long halls of The Knickerbocker, the downtown hospital in which most of the action is set. (Soderbergh directed and shot all 10 episodes in the first season.) It looks shockingly contemporary, and it demands you consider these characters as living beings and not long-dead participants in history that's already set.
Anne Helen Petersen: I am head-over-heels in love with this show, but in a way that reminds me of my college film-major self: I've found myself shockingly willing to overlook some of the weaker aspects of the writing and character development (several of which The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum rightly pointed out in her review) because I'm so enthralled by the look and pace of the thing. Put differently, The Knick has made me into a formalist, which is to say I just want to revel in the ways that the cinematography, score, and editing give the show a pulse that its writing might not.
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Andre Holland
Mary Cybulski/Cinemax
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