This weekend closed the first season of The Knick. The Cinemax series, set around the year 1900, focuses on life and work in a fictional, storied old Manhattan hospital, "the Knickerbocker." In each episode a colorful group of surgeons drip blood, all the while surrounded by corruption and curious women.
The program, directed by Steven Soderbergh, received widely varying reviews: it struck out in the New Yorker, and fascinated the New York Times reviewer Alessandra Stanley. Its images penetrate, but imperfectly. What’s clear is that the Knick is not everyone’s cup of tea.
My take is that the series offers a distorted but rare look at urban medicine in the early 1900s − worth watching if you can stomach the hard core surgery and gory details, however exaggerated and spun.
Clive Owen is terrific to watch as Dr. John Thackery. He’s handsome, smart and flaunts qualities that (still) leave patients and less experienced doctors vulnerable. Like all doctors, he’s got problems. Among those, he’s addicted to cocaine. Toward the end of the season he becomes unwell. His colleagues can’t help but notice his manic unraveling.
The surgical theater works as a sort of play within the TV show. In fact, the Knick was partly inspired and guided by Dr. Stanley B. Burns, a surgeon who cultivated a collection of early medical photographs.
Dr. Algernon Edwards, a Paris-trained physician portrayed by André Holland, gets a spot at the Knick through the confused patronage of a socialite (Juliet Rylance). Though he’s well-educated and talented, the black doctor’s task is impossible from the start; his role is impossible because it is an anachronism. Major hospitals in Manhattan, including those open to the uninsured, had few or no black surgeons on staff in the early, mid – and in some instances, the late 1900s. So while the subject of prejudice in medicine and hiring of doctors is worth exploring, it doesn't fit in the Knick.
Worth noting is Eve Hewson. She gives a knockout performance as Nurse Lucy Elkins. She serves as a credible witness, and accessory, to the doctors’ good and bad efforts.
Along another thread, Maya Kazan convincingly plays a proud doctor’s wife and mother of his dead child. She’s institutionalized near the end, and it’s incredibly sad. The young delusional woman is subjected to pull-the-teeth-out treatment because the doctor in charge of her care believes that infections of the mouth cause mental illness. That’s crazy stuff.
You might see the Knick as a ghoulish side show of old medical oddities. Indeed, it’s a spectacle: a woman has the most unusual plastic surgery, a man gets meningitis after fighting rats in a pit for money, and more like that. Every major character is two-sided to a point of absurdity: an ambulance driver takes what he can get from anyone, most anywhere; a smoking nun performs abortions; a conscientious doctor deals with his demons through some 1900-ish version of Fight Club on New York streets.
Graft, muck, vermin…It’s too much, really, and hard to believe. Still, I’m thrilled the Knick has been renewed for a second season, chiefly because it has so much potential. At the end of the tenth episode, the hospital’s board votes to shutter the facility and move uptown. I wonder where the institution will land – and how much that will cost, what will be the diseases and demographics of the patients there, how the nurses and doctors will get along, and if they’ll accomplish any medical progress.
