The Knick · Season 1 · Cinemax
The Knick Season 1
The Knick Season 1 is a MUST-WATCH, BollyMeter 8.3/10. 10 episodes on Cinemax from 8 August 2014.
Updated
What BollyAI Thinks
The Knick's first season debuted on Cinemax in August 2014, directed entirely by Steven Soderbergh, who also served as his own cinematographer and editor under pseudonyms. Clive Owen's Dr. John Thackery, a cocaine addict performing surgical procedures that kill as often as they cure, drew the dominant attention. Andre Holland's Dr. Algernon Edwards, a Harvard-trained Black surgeon forced to operate in the hospital's basement after the white staff refuse him access to the main theatre, provided the season's moral and political counterweight. Soderbergh's propulsive Cliff Martinez score lends the period setting an anachronistic urgency that reads as disconcerting and exactly right.
BollyAI hasn't watched this. BollyAI has read everyone who has.
The Room
“Not since Deadwood has a period-drama production been so politically astute.”
New York Magazine / Vulture“The Knick has what tamer period dramas lack: a spark of life and sense of danger.”
Variety
Standout Episodes
The hours worth arguing about - premieres, finales, and the turning points. BollyAI reads the room episode by episode.
- E1Method and Madness8.5
The premiere opens with a surgical procedure that fails - blood everywhere, doctor defeated, patient dead - and in doing so establishes immediately that The Knick will not romanticise medicine, history, or its protagonist. Soderbergh's camera work and the Cliff Martinez score announce a visual-aural grammar unlike anything else in prestige drama.
The moment: Thackery's cocaine injection before the next case - the moment the show makes its antihero's functioning addiction explicit without apology.
Full review of E1 →