Steven Soderbergh's TV series The Knick is swanky and enjoyable but lacks bite
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Version 0 of 1. There is a neatness in news of the planned third series of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks coinciding with the arrival in the UK (9pm, Thursday, Sky Atlantic) of Steven Soderbergh’s TV project The Knick. The weird police procedural made by Lynch and Mark Frost (ABC, 1990-91) remains the gold standard for movie talent dabbling in television and – as was the case with Sam Mendes’ Penny Dreadful, David Mamet’s The Unit and David Fincher’s House of Cards – Soderbergh is at some level working in its shadow, if not in his own mind then in many of those of the audience. This is not Soderbergh’s first attempt at television – he made the Washington DC satire K Street in 2003 and his Liberace biopic Behind the Candelebra was rescued by TV from cinematic indifference – but is is the most extended (20 episodes) and mainstream. And, given the subversiveness of some of his movies, from Sex, Lies, and Videotape to The Girlfriend Experience, he can be seen as the most Lynchian figure to take a serious interest in the smaller screen. So the first surprise is that The Knick feels less in the tradition of Twin Peaks and recent genre-busting TV such as Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, than it does of Call the Midwife. Soderbergh’s show is a medical period piece set in a New York hospital in 1900 in which the plots turn on the primitive technology but imaginative ingenuity of clinical practice at the time. Fulfilling the continuity announcer’s warning of “strong language, nudity and surgical scenes from the outset”, the first episode begins with an emergency caesarian – scalpels bloodily slicing open a prosthetic pregnancy belly – and ends with the central character brilliantly inventing the epidural in order to save the life of a patient with septicaemia who cannot be etherised because of bronchitis. This protagonist – Dr John Thackery, played by a moustachioed Clive Owen – also fits easily into a family tree of TV characters. As a brilliant maverick who prospers by doing the opposite of what the hospital authorities ask, Thackeray is clearly an extension of House but also has (as Hugh Laurie’s Dr Gregory House did) a chloroform-strong whiff of a character created by a doctor-novelist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Thackeray is a sort of Sherlock Bones, down to his intuitive solutions to apparently impossible puzzles and even an addiction to solutions of cocaine. Thankfully, a scene in which Thackery, during a withdrawal fit, has to instruct a nurse to inject the drug into the last viable vein in his body (which happens to be in his willy) establishes, although the organ remains off-screen, that Soderbergh has not completely been tamed by the requirements of popular TV. Another dangerous edge in the scripts by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler is that Thackery, true to the views of the time depicted, is a racist, who is initially reluctant to work with an African-American surgeon, Dr Algernon Edwards (André Holland), on the grounds that he “is not interested in leading the charge to mix the races”. Even so, the fact that the owners of the clinic are so determined to create an integrated workplace does have a slight feel of Downton Abbey in the precociously progressive politics of some of the characters. The Knick is swanky, enjoyable drama. You can feel the budget dollars piling up in scenes where Owen’s character hails a cab in a turn-of-20th-century Manhattan street, and there are numerous spikily written scenes, including one in which the young daughter of immigrants is required, as the only bilingual member of the family, to translate to her mother a diagnosis of terminal tuberculosis. The series works very well as a sort of historical prequel to ER, in which scenes that have become too standard on television – surgery, nursing, resuscitation – gain a fresh energy and jeopardy because the staff are making up the procedures as they go along, having to invent a bowel-clamp before they can ask for it. The ambulances even have wind-up sirens. And yet, as an intriguing variation on a standard TV genre, The Knick confirms the apparent rule that – with the exception of David Lynch – movie-makers who come into television seem to be less original and daring than in their day jobs. |