The Knick

i just started this, and while i thought a few of the notes were kinda hammered pretty squarely and obviously, i keep thinking about it. is it too much to think of this as a kind of american balzac? (i'm only 3 eps in, so maybe this is overpraise)

The leaden obviousness of writing and characterization holds it back, but the direction, production design, cinematography and especially the score make it well worth watching.

yeah this show is terribly written but spectacularly executed

they're all "types" but i don't know if that's so bad

bunch of talk about this show here btw Is the work of Steven Soderbergh the most overrated thing ever?

ah thx Clay

not enough talk on that other thread!

yeah unfortunately i think mostly nobody knows abt this show

it's like cronenberg meets john dos passos...... ON TOE-COCAINE

i don't buy the argument that thackery is a reactionary racist; the show quite deliberately portrays him as someone who is using the fact of racism to make an economic argument against integration in what is, as we see, a thin-margin, cut-throat capitalist business. this is, of course, also racism, but it's a more interesting and instructive kind for us to see in action

now that i've seen ep 4 this show is unfortunately at times more Dangerous Method than Dead Ringers

i would be immensely relieved if all the upper-class characters could just use a contraction once in a while

"but i can not do that mother! it is not something i could do!"

I barely knew about this show, but I heard a lot of people proclaiming episode ... 7? as A+ television. The rest, I've heard really mixed things.

OK finished ep 5 and am TOTALLY BACK ON BOARD. anything to do with 1) the typhoid mary storyline or 2) the hapless administrator in hock to the mafia storyline appears to be str8 garbage, but everything else is basically the best. how in love am i with the irish ambulance driver??? his soliloquy at the mass grave site, standing next to the nun, fucking floored me

and just to backtrack a leetle bit, thack is obviously viscerally racist himself, as is pretty much every white person in the show, but he's of that thomas cromwell mold of ruthless pragmatism that allows him to at least appreciate certain qualities of edwards' from his racial remove, some of which he also identifies in himself, which is more than can be said of any of the other characters (including edwards' benefactors, as far as i can tell)

I loved that last scene where he takes his "hard medecine" looking blissfully happy as the camera pans out to a bottle of early 20th century commercial Heroin.

ok i finally caught up and now the season's over!! :(

seems like if/when this comes back, and if the knick somehow survives, wu ping is basically going to be running it

also was i the only one shocked at cornelia's insensitivity at asking edwards to do the deed?? and then she was shocked when he wouldn't. i mean wtf girl.

i also just want to say how much i enjoyed seeing matt frewer reprise his role on Orphan Black as the avuncular mad scientist

and also that i couldn't shake the memory of dr (k)nick on the simpsons holding up a syringe and telling homer reassuringly, "this injection will make the entire operation seem like a beautiful dream" - then shooting it directly into his own arm

watching this series now and just hit 7 -- yep, definitely the standout thus far.

working my way through this, finally. there are things to praise, but it's so damned heavy handed, i feel like i'm being slapped on the head over and over. for a show that seems to try to get so many details right, it doesn't really seem curious about the past, but mainly self-congratulatory about how unpleasant it can make it seem... maybe operating under the common fallacy that the most unpleasant version of reality is necessarily the most truthful.

i mean, i can see how soderbergh would be interested in this, and i like a fair number of the visual ideas he's brought to it, although sometimes i think they amount to him working overtime to make something that's kind of leaden seem to float.

granted i haven't gotten to the much-celebrated episode 7 yet, so take all this with a few grains of salt.

i didn't think episode 7 was very good.

i pretty much appreciate this show strictly as historical accuracy porn. all the oscar biopic talk lately cements it, i admire that soderbergh uses the "actual things that happened are totally wild" approach, even if it comes out all perfectly plated and obvious. the last few episodes lay it on thick esp w/the hodgeman character who sort of just recites his own wikipedia page.

Ep 7 is the race riot one, right? The race riot episode I found incredibly tense and hard to watch (in the "so fucking unfair!" sort of reaction I mean), but I thought it was great. Really like this show. I'm ok with all the surgery gore, but syphillis nose lady was a shock.

My only complaint was after the coke shortage kicks in, they played on Thack's jonesing way way too heavily at the expense of other storylines. It started to grate a bit. I hope they drop that if they get a new season.

yeah def the least interesting storyline.

weren't they already given a 2nd season?

yeah coke shortage storyline really put the post-7 show into a nosedive.

the black character in this film is like a 21st century fantasy of a black man in new york of 1900. the show doesn't seem the least bit curious about what it would really be like to be an african-american in that milieu, what attitudes he might have, where he might live, etc. but that's symptomatic of the show in general, which in terms of its understanding of the past is about as shallow as anything i can recall. that said, the show can be pretty compelling; i put that down largely to the directing and the acting (and my being fairly easily entertained).

c'mon y'all, the coke shortage storyline ain't exactly genius storytelling but it can stay for the "LET'S DOUSE YOUR SEX WITH IT" scenes, those were bazonkers, especially clive owen's facial expressions

returns tonight! prob won't watch till tomorrow because what really cures my inevitable saturday hangovers is some surgery footage in the morning, but excited to see what they do with it. i'm not sure how sustainable the show is beyond and even within this second season, though that's kind of the thrill imo

started watching the first season yesterday

I loved S1 so will be more than whelmed if they serve up more of the same. Saturday nights are made for brutal period dramas with lots of profanities and medical gore.

tbh I wasn't prepared for the level of gore and when they go right into chopping into that pregnant woman in the first episode I was like "well, here we go"

It isn't always easy to take but I think it is important to show how dangerous some of these early medical procedures were and getting a feel of the thin line between life & death is part of what makes this series quite gripping imo

really gets into the feeling of surgery being much more of an engineering task than a science

http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/on-set-steven-soderbergh-the-knick.html

Haven't seen this yet, but this has me interested---

The Knick can look more like a John Ford or William Wyler or Orson Welles movie, in which every image is carefully considered, than most modern scripted TV, where the goal is mainly to capture performances and push the story along. Soderbergh mentions Welles’s The Trial and Chimes at Midnight, in particular, as influences on the look of season two, with their “sustained shots that go on forever.”

...

There are no stand-ins on the set of The Knick, no Gulfstream trailers for producers and cast, and no canvas chairs, because no one sits still long enough to require them. A workday here is a nine-to-six sprint, with an hour off for lunch. “Actors love working with this guy,” O’Brien says, “because they’re not sitting around all day waiting for the set to be lit.” Soderbergh tells me: “It keeps the actors on the boil, nobody leaves, and — like we just did — you can power through the whole scene and it’s done.”

Maybe that was discussed on the other Soderbergh thread...

the skill with which soderbergh and co. execute this show pretty much steamrolls any faults it has. like, you can see them but it's so kinetically engaging and the performances are (largely) so on point you don't really care.

in other hands the flaws might be crippling, here it's like, "well, ok, that's a bit off but holy shit look at how that corridor shot is composed and the lighting good god." with one notable exception for me - i haaaated the storyline with the hospital administrator's gambling debts and beloved prostitute. it wasn't that interesting and in all of those scenes the character was at peak annoyance levels

the show doesn't seem the least bit curious about what it would really be like to be an african-american in that milieu, what attitudes he might have, where he might live, etc.

are you forgetting the scene where it shows the shitty flophouse he lives in, and him having to stand in line for the toilet, and getting sneered at by a working class black dude with a chip on his shoulder? and how that dynamic appears to form the basis for his penchant for violence?

i did not forget that scene; i still think the character is a thin conceit.

i stand by this

it doesn't really seem curious about the past, but mainly self-congratulatory about how unpleasant it can make it seem... maybe operating under the common fallacy that the most unpleasant version of reality is necessarily the most truthful

while still liking the film a lot

er, the tv show

well you can certainly say the show deals with it in a facile way but you can't say "the show doesn't seem the least bit curious about what it would really be like to be an african-american in that milieu, what attitudes he might have, where he might live" when it contains several scenes explicitly addressing each of those issues. (recall also the intensely uncomfortable dinner party scene thrown by his benefactors, highlighting that for a well-educated african american man in those days both the shitty flophouse and the high-class soiree could be equally alienating)

yes i suppose i was being hyperbolic. but the character himself--his postures, his attitudes, his flaws--seems to be a projection of some kind of hip 21st-century screenwriters' conceit of a "flawed black hero" back into a 19th-century milieu. which is a standard "sin" of period pieces, i suppose, but for a film that seems so intent on demonstrating its interest in the past largely by telegraphing its sheer awfulness, it seems a notable failure.

it doesn't really seem curious about the past, but mainly self-congratulatory about how unpleasant it can make it seem... maybe operating under the common fallacy that the most unpleasant version of reality is necessarily the most truthful

i think this might be backwards. i think it's less interested in horror as a means to the true nature of the past than it is in using the setting of the past as the way to a certain kind of horror. or better: a kind of uncanniness that seems to exist at a level closer to the surface in a hospital circa 1900 than it would in a present day hospital. i mean i know the common (and understandable) reaction is usually "wow shit was crazy back then" but then it's refracted through the present in a way that makes medical science itself seem strange, and not simply just another iteration of "the past is a foreign country."

that sounds pretty convincing, actually!

dumb question -- has the 2nd season begun yet?

yes, it's good!

Anyone been watching S2? I'm really enjoying it so far. They've backed off, at least a little, on focussing on Thacks addiction (tho now its him being OCD over finding a cure for addiction).

I hate Algie's suddenly-announced bitchy wife from London.

Tom Cleary as the new moral centre of the series is a good move and the dark eugenics stuff isn't covered enough in 20th century period drama. I love it still.

Yes! That character has really surprised and pleased me, I loved his blackmail the uptown ladies trick to get sister Harriet off the charges. Awesome.

And the eugenics stuff is so maddening and creepy.

I don't know why I'm not watching this, I loved the first series

The bluffing of hypnosis with the pipe was hilarious

I'm not ready for whatever horrible fate waits for Genevieve

love this show, but the actress who plays cornelia is a real dud. she just destroys her scenes.

was flabbergasted by the williams and walker appearance, but i know williams's records and it's a lot less coarse than how it was depicted in the show.

er, by "it" i mean the humor.

Cripes I forgot all about this show.

when did season 2 end? i only just caught up w/ it on blu-ray now.

Almost done with S1. John Hodgman as the director of the mental asylum is pretty brilliant casting, especially when he first shows up, so many lols.

On many levels this show is phenomenally depressing, because it just feels like none of the important things have changed since the era it depicts. And that makes it pretty great TV!
Consistently impressed by Clive Owen's makeup and hair. Can't wait to see how the administrator's arc with the gangsters winds up.

Season 2 finale is one hell of a mic drop.

not going to go over this whole thread for fear of #spoilers, but wow -- about halfway through the first seasons and this show is fantastic.

Still wondering what the hell the status of this show is!

Major spoilers in the following link but gives some idea of the status of the show: http://www.cinemablend.com/television/1405229/Knick-Probably-Renewed-With-One-Changehttp://www.cinemablend.com/television/1405229/Knick-Probably-Renewed-With-One-Change

^ Sorry for the doublepost

I totally failed on that link but it indicates a script for season 3 was ordered, just nothing confirmed at this point for production.

^ http://www.cinemablend.com/television/1405229/Knick-Probably-Renewed-With-One-Change

I told them that I’m going to do the first two years and then we are going to break out the story for seasons 3 and 4 and try and find a filmmaker or filmmakers to do this the way that I did. This is how we want to do this so that every two years, whoever comes on, has the freedom to create their universe.

jesus christ this season 2 finale

I'm just listening to Thack do his, uh, thing and typing with one eye closed

“Despite our pride in and affection for the series, as well as our respect for and gratitude towards Steven Soderbergh and his team, we have decided to return Cinemax to its original primetime series fare of high-octane action dramas, many of which will be internationally co-produced.”

http://deadline.com/2017/03/the-knick-canceled-two-seasons-cinemax-1202049938/

I gotta say I find this thread more entertaining than the series.

and WHERE is the commentary about seeing Bono's daughter, looking quite unmistakably like dad, gettin' it on with Clive Owen? Scenes will haunt me.

false flag?
https://decider.com/2023/04/21/the-knick-spin-off-still-alive-hbo/amp/"> https://decider.com/2023/04/21/the-knick-spin-off-still-alive-hbo/amp/