The Knick

Steven Soderbergh's The Knick is exhilaratingly alien.

The Knick rides the beautifully brutal, brutally beautiful nexus of 2014’s televised finest--Hannibal, True Detective, and The Leftovers all leap to mind--set aside by moments of true hope.

The Knick towers above previous original dramas Strike Back and Banshee, giving Cinemax a gold star on an increasingly crowded boulevard of bravura television.

The show was created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, but it's Soderbergh's vision, from the brilliant but unusual score (minimalist electronic music) to the wry camera angles (the series opens on Owen's shoes as he lounges in a brothel). For a period piece, it's strikingly contemporary--and quite gory, although the surgery scenes never feel gratuitous.

The Knick is an astonishing new medical drama that has the potential to be one of the year’s best and most talked-about shows, as well as a breakthrough into TV series excellence for its star, Clive Owen, and its director and executive producer, Steven Soderbergh.

Not since Deadwood has a period-drama production designed to a fare-thee-well and steeped in nasty atmosphere been so politically astute about who has power over whom and why--although the subtler brand of gallows humor and Soderbergh’s fondness for intricately choreographed long takes aligns The Knick with a different TV classic that Deadwood creator David Milch worked on, Hill Street Blues.

It's not easy to watch, but the Steven Soderbergh-directed period hospital drama sure is worth a look.

For fans of quality TV, The Knick will evoke memories of the South Boston-set “St. Elsewhere.” That show needed more than a season to work out its kinks. The Knick is already off to a robust start.

If the show takes a while to warm up--and seems to hit certain character beats, like Thack's cocaine addiction, or his feelings towards rookie nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson), over and over again--it builds in the way you would hope a modern cable drama season would, and many of the repetitive earlier scenes wind up laying a foundation for major shifts in the season's second half.

The Knick is compulsively, crudely riveting, even when your natural instinct is to avert your eyes and demand to be released from this hellhole, stat.

Overall, The Knick is a sublimely addictive ride for which viewers will want to scrub up.

Despite some clumsy exposition by its creators, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, it has a well-researched sense of place.

Cinemax originals have mostly been built on testosterone and skin. The Knick gives us a fuller and richer body.

There’s an undercurrent of tragedy in nearly every scene of The Knick, and yet the show never becomes overly depressing.

The Knick is unusual and very good. It’s a great leap backward in time, yet another ambitious examination of at an important but often overlooked epoch in history.

For all its volatility and rough textures, after a few episodes, The Knick begins to draw you into its idiosyncratic rhythms.

Despite first impressions that can feel one-note, all the characters turn out to be complicated and intriguing.

Under Soderbergh's direction, The Knick is a dark and gritty saga that captures a time of major changes--not only on the medical front, but in industrialization and race relations.

Like “True Detective,” The Knick benefits from a consistent vision and stellar cinematography. Its turn-of-the-century sets and costuming will transport viewers into the past more vividly than any stuffy sitting room in “Downton Abbey.” But it requires dedication to stick around with The Knick until the action gets going a few episodes in.

The results of Soderbergh's latest foray into series television are frequently terrific.

It’s a serious work of television that is angling to dramatize numerous weighty subjects, and isn’t overly concerned with distracting the audience with shiny objects in the process.

A period piece with serious punch, The Knick isn’t for the faint of heart.

Aided by that blood and a driving, anachronistic techno-beat score, The Knick avoids the worst trap of a period piece: It isn't quaint. It's also never dull.

The Knick (rated TV-MA, and definitely for mature audiences only) can be difficult to watch. Medical procedures are graphic, as are scenes involving Thackery’s drug use. But this is one riveting drama.

While the designated flawed hero John espouses an essential grasp of the purpose of medicine and the workings of disease (“Despite what you may believe,” he tells Cornelia, “Sickness isn’t a result of poor character, germs don’t examine your bankbook”), he’s also stymied, by his own prejudices as well as money concerns. That these might take him in different directions suggests the series has some sense of the difficulty of medicine then and still.

The series is at its most convincing, and most beautiful, at its most static. When the show bursts into action, or insists upon making its characters intense and extraordinary--some of them fictionally take credit for real-world medical advances and inventions--it grows, paradoxically, proportionally less interesting.

It doesn’t have the distinctive voice and language that David Milch gave Deadwood, though, and the writing isn’t always up to the distinctive direction and performances. The show grows on you, though, or it did on me.

Under this gorgeous dressing, The Knick feels curiously hollow.

We've seen addicted medicos before, and the first two episodes of The Knick don't render any of the characters as three-dimensional as their setting (though that's asking a lot of a pilot--and the second episode is better).

The series is exceedingly good at what it does, but that is not storytelling, which leaves The Knick in the curious position of being utterly absorbing without being particularly engaging.

All 10 episodes of the first season are directed by Mr. Soderbergh, who brings grittiness and the occasional odd camera angle but not much light to the proceedings (this is a seriously dark show with limited use of lighting). Writers/series creators Jack Amiel and Michael Begler introduce plenty of characters with interwoven, serialized storylines but there’s not much new under the dim sun in The Knick.

This dark medical drama directed by Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh suffers from multiple ailments, not least of which is its relentlessly grim tone.

All the care that Soderbergh has taken with the colors, the camera, the blood--all his masterfully deployed aesthetic choices--stand in stark contrast to the care taken with the scripts.

The resulting episodes, however, are a bit like an impressionistic painting: intriguing to look at, perhaps, but not always clear in conveying what the actual intent is. And while the characters and their relationships do progress, for the most part those arcs develop along assiduous and fairly predictable lines.

Rather than innovate, the series, on Cinemax, leans hard on cable drama’s hoariest (and whoriest) antiheroic formulas, diluting potentially powerful themes.