Film

Steven Soderbergh elevates TV drama ‘The Knick’

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Three and a half stars

The Knick Fridays, 10 p.m., Cinemax.

When director Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from feature films, he immediately took on a whole range of other artistic projects, one of which is directing all 10 episodes in the first season of Cinemax drama The Knick. It’s a departure both for Soderbergh and for the network, whose previous original programming (shows like Banshee and Strike Back) has generally focused on over-the-top action and nudity, rather than weighty themes or complex characters. Soderbergh reportedly requested to have The Knick air on Cinemax rather than more prestigious sister network HBO, but it fits well alongside HBO shows like Boardwalk Empire and True Detective.

The title of The Knick is short for the Knickerbocker Hospital, one of New York City’s primary medical institutions in 1900. It’s an era of great leaps forward in medicine, and the hospital’s chief of surgery, Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen), is at the forefront of new discoveries. Thackery is also a bit of a medical-drama cliché, the arrogant genius with personal demons (including a drug habit), and, like the rest of the show’s characters, he takes a few episodes to develop a more well-rounded personality. But The Knick is worth sticking with as those characters slowly develop, and it provides plenty of fascinating (and fascinatingly gross) details of medical history along the way.

Although Soderbergh is the director (and cinematographer and editor) on every episode, he’s not one of the show’s writers, and creators Jack Amiel and Michael Begler sometimes fall back on stock medical scenarios, adjusted for the period (this is certainly the only hospital drama in which the majority of patients die), and easy character-defining shorthand. Even when the writing falters, though, Soderbergh finds inventive ways to present the material, whether that’s by shooting scenes from unexpected vantage points, or by dropping out the sound during a particularly tense moment.

Not all of Soderbergh’s choices work—the icy electronic score by his frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez is an odd fit for a period drama—but his presence elevates what could have been a more pedestrian series into something sophisticated, compelling and unexpectedly affecting.

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