The Knick: Season 1 (2014)

Over the last couple of years, we’ve heard a lot about how television is becoming the new cinema, but even auteur-helmed series such as Boardwalk Empire, Falling Skies and Luck have still tended to feel writer-driven, for the simple reason that their respective auteurs have only tended to direct the occasional episode here and there, if at all. The Knick utterly breaks with that mould, offering up a period drama revolving around New York’s legendary Knickerbocker Hospital in which every single episode is directed, shot and edited by Steven Soderbergh. As such, it’s much like watching Soderbergh at his most sublime for ten straight hours. That would be quite a luxurious experience for any director of his standing, but it’s enhanced by the fact that Soderbergh’s peculiar capacity to evoke and capture information flow has a kind of insatiability about it that’s even more apparent and compelling when given the kind of longform treatment that it is here. In his hands, the screenplay moves beyond more familiar medical tropes to become one of experimental insatiability and informational addiction, in the form of Dr. John Thackery’s (Clive Owen) ceaseless, drug-addled efforts to turn the Knick into the centre for medical research and publication in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the period detail tends to revolve around procedure, equipment and technology, all of which are brought to bear on a series of extended surgical sequences that would be unbearably grisly – and perhaps too graphic for even quality television -  were there not such a cool sense of the body as an informational surface, a data threshold for an age in which, as Thackery continually reminds us, more medical progress had been made in five years than in the previous two hundred. Clinical in the most profound way, even the most involved and gruesome surgical tableaux have a kind of post-human detachment to them, as if to capture just how far Thackery’s prophecies for medical intervention and augmentation might have ranged at his most visionary and far-sighted. Like Contagion, which it often recalls – there’s a subplot about Typhoid Mary – the perspectives also tend to be epidemiological rather than experiential, as Soderbergh disaggregates all the body’s discrete sensations and perceptions into a remarkably busy portrait of progressivist New York as a sliding spectrum of humans, micro-organisms and urban infrastructure, not exactly organic, but not exactly inorganic either. Every shot feels viral, on the verge of sentience, while Soderbergh’s style has never seemed so autonomous, so indistinguishable from the unextinguishable flicker of data that sustains it. Soaking up all the hinges between gas and electric light, absorbing all the residual gloom and murk that hasn’t yet been accounted for, his camera feels like the forensic tool or medical breakthrough that everyone’s anxious to patent, perhaps explaining why it’s so attuned to the Knick’s surgical stage, whose whitewashed walls are so bright that they feel backlit, blinding you like a digital tablet shone on a world that’s barely even electric. By the end, medicine and light have more or less converged on a new, proto-digital awareness of data – the electrifiction of the hospital is a crucial and recurring plot point – with the result that you feel Soderbergh’s digital cinematography address your body as never before, distending across your photoreceptors even as it distends over ten whole hours, and leaving a new physiology in its wake, a physiology that suddenly seems to demand the kind of restless medical research that’s so evocatively explored and emulated here.