Cinemax has released the first official promo for Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, its new 10-episode period drama starring Clive Owen. Here’s a little background from Deadline:
Soderbergh will direct all of the episodes. The setting: downtown New York in 1900, a tumultuous time of massive change and great progress. The series centers around the groundbreaking surgeons, nurses and staff at Knickerbocker Hospital, who are pushing the bounds of medicine in a time of astonishingly high mortality rates and zero antibiotics.
A few thoughts:
– Steven Soderbergh is not very good at retirement.
– The phrase “astonishingly high mortality rates and zero antibiotics” sent shivers down my spine.
– All I can think about now is, like, John Starks and Charles Oakley as turn-of-the-century surgeons.
– I am very much a fan of this new “bring in auteurs and big-name Hollywood stars and give them free rein over a single season of pay cable television” trend. It takes the best parts of feature films (a bigger budget and less of an ongoing time commitment than a long-running series) and television (freedom and a chance to tell a longer story), and it mushes them all up into into delicious glob.
Verdict: Let’s file this one under “Optimistic.”
