Surgical precision

Erstwhile auteur Steven Soderbergh has his hands in every facet of ‘The Knick’

Cinemax’s “The Knick,” the newest project from Steven Soderbergh, is predictably great. The ever-evolving artist is at this point not so much a filmmaker as a multimedia dabbler—he paints, he writes, he designs products, he directs. His suspicious self-proclaimed retirement from making feature films appears to be less a disingenuous attention-grab than a pragmatic response to the increasingly difficult terrain of Hollywood moviemaking (his “State of Cinema” lecture at last year’s San Francisco Film Festival is a must-watch for anyone interested in the subject). So it makes sense that the insatiable auteur would return to television (he helmed HBO’s little-seen political drama “K Street” in 2003), a flourishing medium that has lately become a safe harbor for adult artists interested in telling serious stories.

Soderbergh being Soderbergh, he not only lends his name as executive producer and directs the pilot (as the current trend demands), he shoots, edits, and directs every single episode of the 10-hour season. He even recruits his frequent collaborator Cliff Martinez to compose what has to be one of the most anachronistic music scores—moody electronica, trademark Martinez, for a show set in 1900—in the history of television. This level of involvement, virtually unheard of in the rigorous, time-consuming world of television production, means that viewers are treated to what is essentially a 10-hour Steven Soderbergh movie, and the first hour is damn good.

The series is set in 1900 and focuses on New York City’s Knickerbocker Hospital, where a team of surgeons led by John Thackery (Clive Owen) struggle to develop more sophisticated methods of treating the human body as filth and disease hold life expectancy in the low 40s.

Thackery is a junkie, addicted to liquid cocaine and ravaged by track marks and collapsed veins. He is brilliant at his work, but his bedside manner is sorely lacking and his social skills outside of the operating “theater” are even worse. Some have already dismissed the show as a period re-working of “House,” which is absurd; the similarities between Thackery and Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House are certainly there on the shallowest, bullet-point level, but “The Knick” owes as much to “House” as “True Detective” does to “Hannibal.”

The pilot, which premiered on August 10 and is now available for streaming on YouTube, opens with a gruesome surgery that goes tragically wrong. A pregnant woman is hemorrhaging, and Thackery and his mentor, J.M. Christiansen (Matt Frewer), along with a team of assistants, perform a kind of primitive C-Section in front of a captive audience of doctors. Mother and child both die on the operating table. Christiansen, distraught by the loss, washes his hands, retreats to his office, and puts a bullet in his head.

Thackery inherits the mantle of Chief Surgeon, a promotion he eagerly accepts until the hospital’s benefactor, Cornelia Robertson (Juliet Rylance), insists that Thackery consider the Harvard-educated, European-trained Dr. Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland) as his new assistant. When Edwards shows up and turns out to be black, Thackery bluntly denies him on grounds that many patients would not trust a black man to treat them. This plot point provides the central conflict of the episode, which ends with another gory, riveting operation in which surgeons must remove a septic portion of a man’s intestine.

The scenes of surgery, with their archaic tools and primitive methods, are both fascinating and repulsive. Soderbergh’s camera doesn’t flinch, and the make-up and effects work are remarkably, nauseatingly realistic. All the blood and viscera and bile may make the show a challenge for all but the most desensitized gorehounds, but it’s worth it. As the last surgery ended, I found myself sympathizing with Dr. Edwards, who, jaw on the floor, says to Dr. Thackery, “I’m not leaving this circus until I learn everything you have to teach.”