Raw passion: Steven Soderbergh hospital drama The Knick keeps everything real
A drug-addled chief surgeon, a brilliant black doctor thwarted by racism, a conflicted young nurse and lots and lots of blood – the second season of Cinemax’s The Knick is full of gruesome promise. Charley Lanyon meets the stars of the show.
The Knick is not an easy show to watch. The hospital drama centres on a group of brilliant medics working in New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital in the early 1900s, performing a series of sometimes gruesome and often fatal operations in a bid to progress surgical techniques.
In preparation for the second season (which in Hong Kong premieres on Cinemax on October 17) the actors are talking to the press in parent channel HBO’s offices in midtown Manhattan. When they describe the show, the words “grim”, “bleak” and “exhausting” crop up time and time again. Everyone is in agreement that the writers, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, and the director, the legendary Steven Soderbergh, excel in rendering difficult situations and introducing intractable problems.
“It wasn’t easy,” says British actor Clive Owen, of playing chief surgeon John Thackery, who is pioneering C-sections and skin grafts while battling cocaine addiction; the character is partly based on real-life surgeon William Stewart Halsted.
“It wasn’t straightforward but I loved the challenge of it,” says Owen.
“Loved the challenge” could also describe the experience of watching the show. The Knick takes up so many television tropes that it can be hard, at first, to take seriously. It is a hospital drama, a period drama, a troubled genius story and another example of what American writer Brett Martin calls “the genre of difficult men”. The issues it deals with are so fundamental as to seem obvious: racism, sexism, science versus religion and the savage reality (or unreality) of the American dream.
Then there’s the way the show deals with its themes. The Knick can seem profoundly unsubtle. The dialogue comes in quickly spoken exposition, the acting is often framed in close-ups, all bulging, bloodshot eyes and sweating brows, and the operations are full of oozing blood and theatrical gore (they are performed in an auditorium, before a student audience, for the most part).
Yet the show is like a whirlpool; its riveting account of medical history, of a hospital treating the city’s poorest citizens and of a prodigious black doctor’s struggle to be recognised, keeps pulling you in.
