From 2014 to 2015, the Steven Soderbergh-directed period drama The Knick was a huge hit with critics and audiences. Then, two years after the second season, Cinemax announced it was cancelled.
Why? It had the misfortune of falling victim to a programming shakeup at Cinemax’s parent company, HBO, which wanted to better compete with streamers and make finding its next Game of Thrones a priority.
So, The Knick ceremoniously fell on the chopping block, lost to history. But despite being short-lived, it’s one of HBO Max’s best original series. See why Watch With Us thinks it needs to be your next binge-watch.
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It’s an Engrossing Look at a Dark Period in Human History
The central plot of The Knick surrounds the Knickerbocker Hospital in the year 1900, once a real-life medical institution in New York City. Its chief surgeon, Dr. John Thackery (Clive Owen, partly based on Dr. William Stewart Halsted), is a cocaine and opium-addicted medical genius, who fights to create new techniques and inventions within the limitations of the time period, medical knowledge and the hospital’s notoriously meager budget.
Watching The Knick will make you marvel at how far we have come in the history of medical science, and how lucky we all were to be born in a period when such strides in medicine and technology have been made. Dealing with medical dilemmas and surgeries that have common procedures and solutions now was like walking on a string of spiderweb between life and death back then. Common illnesses could kill, simple surgeries didn’t have the tools to save lives and needless deaths abounded. Thus, The Knick brings into sharp relief the morbid difficulties of the early 1900s while wrapped in an endlessly engaging narrative.
The Series Balances Engaging, Often Unlikable Characters
The eclectic ensemble cast, largely made up of character actors, is given the daunting task of portraying unlikable, often reprehensible people that we nonetheless need to align with and root for. The most difficult dynamics pertain to André Holland’s character Dr. Algernon Edwards, a highly-regarded Black surgeon who has been assigned to the all-white Knickerbocker. As you can probably imagine, this is much to the disdain of nearly all of his colleagues.
Racism in the early 1900s obviously abounded, and Edwards experiences it from all angles. The series can’t just make its protagonists all miraculously open-minded white people during the early 20th century, because that’s not how things were. If it wants to be period accurate, it must deftly weave these realistic prejudices into characters that we nevertheless need to empathize with — including the lead protagonist, Dr. Thackery, who is one of Edwards’ chief combatants. In the end, the writers for The Knick pull it off beautifully, crafting characters who bear these frustrating flaws while remaining human.
The Content of the Episodes Is Not For the Faint of Heart
The Knick is a great binge watch for October in particular, because even though it’s not a horror show, it is frequently a horror show. Blood, guts and gore abound, and the series opens up with a gruesome failed procedure in which Thackery and his esteemed colleague, Dr. J. M. Christiansen, attempt to perform a placenta praevia surgery to save a mother and her unborn child. The Knick immediately throws you into its world, as the struggling doctors fail miserably. The opening scene ends with Christiansen killing himself.
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Every episode doesn’t just come with oozing blood and exposed innards, but also horrifying malformations, surgeries and other bodily disorders. The Knick puts on full display the absolute frailty and terror of the human body, and also just how strong a stomach all doctors and nurses need to have to watch people get sliced into like butter every day. The Knick features so, so much slicing, and even when you know it’s fake, it can’t help but feel all too real — but also in the best ways.
Stream The Knick now on HBO Max.
