{"id":933,"date":"2014-08-09T13:01:07","date_gmt":"2014-08-09T17:01:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/?p=933"},"modified":"2014-08-16T13:41:26","modified_gmt":"2014-08-16T17:41:26","slug":"knick-premiere-recap-review-method-madness-cocaine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/2014\/08\/09\/knick-premiere-recap-review-method-madness-cocaine\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Knick’ Premiere Recap and Review: ‘Method and Madness’ and Cocaine"},"content":{"rendered":"

In many ways, Cinemax\u2019s The Knick<\/em> is late to our television sets. By that I don\u2019t mean its 1900 medical practices\u2014those spraying, gushing, medical practices\u2014are too forgone to be subject fodder for prestige television drama; they aren\u2019t. By that I mean there are some elements we\u2019ve seen before occurring between the credits.<\/p>\n

Take for instance our lead character, Manhattan surgeon John Thackery. I\u2019m getting tired of typing it, but they just keep coming back: \u201cantihero.\u201d Like Walter White, Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Jimmy McNulty, he\u2019s got some unquenchable personal vices (control to Walt; Tone, Don, and Jim\u2019s power, women, alcohol\/women\/power, and alcohol\/women, respectively), an enormous ego, and a drive to be recognized for his achievements. But what so many of the failed facsimiles of these great characters who showed up late to the game\u2014trying in vein to reverse engineer audiences\u2019 conflicting emotions with these at once great and despicable men (that they\u2019re always men is something else I\u2019m getting equally tired of typing)\u2014don\u2019t have is a lead like Clive Owen and a director like Steven Soderbergh crafting a persona from the ground up.<\/p>\n

As Thackery, Owen breathes confidence into whatever room he settles, a genius and a mad man at all once, as his newest colleague would eventually note. Thackery\u2019s primary function is also to save lives\u2014not just those lying on the operating theater table, but those in the future that his experiments will save in the hands of other doctors around the world. That\u2019s a burden the antiheroes before him didn\u2019t have to (and would never want to) bear.<\/p>\n

In that sense he\u2019s more like Draper\u2019s friend and neighbor Arnie Rosen, the surgeon who\u2019s aware he lives and deals with death constantly, but does so in a detached manner. Rosen\u2019s detachment is more a natural mystery, Thackery\u2019s is just part of his process. All he really wants is to improve medicine, preferably with his name attached to it, and whether that means saving the person on the table in front of him or using them as a learning experience is probably about all the same to him. This is what makes Thackery original: so far, at least, he\u2019s anything but conflicted; he’s just driven.<\/p>\n

This has become (only a) part of Soderbergh\u2019s legend; taking a formula audiences know and love (if they\u2019re not already tiring of it), and breathing new life into it with only a few key adjustments. Only here he\u2019s doing it threefold: as an antihero story, a medical drama, and a period drama. If you want to take it a step further, he\u2019s also breathing new life into television in general, filming the entire season as a 10-hour movie around New York City in 73 days.<\/p>\n

The result so far? An intriguing first hour that, if nothing else, sets the stage for a (hopefully) deeply human series. Where many shows struggle to connect with audiences, the scope of The Knick<\/em> will always be pertinent in that it\u2019s a close look at man\u2019s drive to prolong humanity, and in its wake, we see much of the ugliness that Thackery and his colleagues are struggling so hard to prolong: a hospital all but turning away an accomplished American-American surgeon; a city health inspector who extracts bribes for a living; an ambulance driver who uses the threat of physical force to ensure his team gets the subject in question (and rewarded on commission); a surgeon carrying out high-risk procedures while ripped on cocaine.<\/p>\n

The Knick<\/em> isn\u2019t explosive. It\u2019s not mysterious. It\u2019s not scandalous. It\u2019s not a thriller, and it\u2019s not action-packed. More than anything, though, and more than can be found in most corners of the television universe, The Knick<\/em> is human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In many ways, Cinemax\u2019s The Knick is late to our television sets. By that I don\u2019t mean its 1900 medical practices\u2014those spraying, gushing, medical practices\u2014are too forgone to be subject fodder for prestige television drama; they aren\u2019t. By that I mean there are some elements we\u2019ve seen before occurring between the credits. Take for instance<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":936,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,176],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-933","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-television","8":"category-television-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hardwoodandhollywood.com\/pop-culture-spin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}