A Cinemax Special: The Knick

Everyday for the past couple of months I've seen a poster for The Knick on my way to work. I see a scrubbed up Clive Owen as he's about to perform a surgery with the name Steven Soderbergh hovering over him to tempt me even more. I was intrigued instantly but didn't have the time to watch it when I first saw the poster but I looked it up a little while ago and saw that it was produced by Cinemax. Call me ignorant and naive (a lot of people do) but I thought Cinemax specialised in porn or documentaries about porn or soft porn, basically things that were porn related. I could sort of understand Soderbergh's involvement in the show and Cinemax because even though he panders to the masses with Oceans movies but he is quite experimental and likes to push boundaries but I didn't understand Clive Owen's involvement in a show which I assumed would be like True Blood but set in a twentieth century hospital. This weekend I decided to watch the first episode and again learnt that I shouldn't judge a book by its cover. I really should stop it, I miss out on a lot.

The Knick is set in the early twentieth century in New York and follows the lives of the staff that work there, the main character being Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen). I tend to love period pieces, and no I don't been the heritage dramas starring Keira Knightly that the UK spits out every year to garner awards and money, but real period pieces. Shows and films that don't centre on aristocrats as they decide who to marry or getting over a stutter, but ones that feature gritty realism which is what the audience gets with The Knick. It is a hospital that is set in a part of New York that isn't affluent so their patients are mainly people that are of lower class and living in poverty. They are the patients that would allow untested methods to survive so the audience gets to see how modern medicine has come to be what it is. In the first episode alone we see Dr. Thackery perform two procedure that would be deemed unorthodox at the time, and hopefully we'll see many more in the episodes to come and people learning from it. We've had hospital dramas like ER and Greys Anatomy but we haven't had anything like this, we haven't seen the experimental side of medicine and it's advancement over the years so it should be interesting to watch.



We have a very flawed lead in Dr. Thackery, he is a highly skilled surgeon but he clearly has some personal demons which I can't wait to find out about. He has a cocaine addiction that he can't quit himself which we can see when he is going through withdrawal which Owen excels at, in all honesty if awards had any merit they should've just given him them all when the episode aired. It will be quite intriguing to watch his addiction unfold as it was a different attitude back then, cocaine was a prescribed drug and they didn't have treatment facilities as they do know. In a show that is set in modern day you would expect him to find help and get over it but that isn't possible in The Knick so it does have me wondering how or it he will kick the habit. He is a no nonsense doctor and brilliant at his job which he is well aware of and that's probably where his arrogance comes from. He knows he has a bad habit but still thinks he is at a higher status that his peers, and they don't help because they just heap praise on him. Hopefully over time the characters will realise that he is flawed and human and it may ground him.

We also have the character of Dr. Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland) who is the new assistant chief surgeon at the Knick who happens to be black so clearly he isn't going to be welcomed with open arms. Dr. Thackery actually threatened to quit his job if the higher up insisted on hiring, and many of the other doctors at the Knick shunned him and his diagnosis' which could have taken the life of a man. I don't really need to say that race relations in the US in the early twentieth century weren't great so the drama a black doctor brings to the show is brilliant. We've already seen that the doctors have shunned him, will the patients risk their lives and ignore as well? He's clearly a talented doctor if the hospital wanted to higher him in a time where racial integration was still decades away. The show didn't really need anymore tension but the character of Dr. Edwards adds it and it will be exciting to watch, and we'll be able to see the character development of others through him and whether they end up choosing to accept him.

There are also plenty of other characters that were introduced in the first episode including Dr. Bertie Chickering Jr. (Michael Angarano) who is trying to break away from his fathers legacy and seems to be accepting of social progression if his reaction to Dr. Edwards is anything to go by. We also have the young nurse Lucy Elkins (Eve Hewson) who has just moved to New York and is ridiculed by Thackery but is the only one that knows about his addiction. She seems like a naive young girl in the beginning but it I expect her to grow over time, and possible help Dr. Thackery overcome him demons and be a respected member of the staff there. In short, all the characters seem to have a lot of potential and because of that and the era that the show is set in there seems to be a lot of places the storylines can go, and I will gladly watch the events of the Knick unfold.

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