The Knick Review

Steven Soderbergh directed every one of the twenty episodes, photographed them under his Peter Andrews pseudonym and cut them as Mary Ann Bernard, and the result is the most coherent visual object in prestige television of its decade. The camera sits low, stays wide and never quite stops moving, the light is sodium and green, and Cliff Martinez scores 1900 Manhattan with analogue synthesisers that should not work and do, because everyone on screen believes they are living in the future.

The medicine is the reason to watch. The pilot opens on a caesarean performed in front of a paying audience and failing in front of them, and the series keeps coming back to the operating theatre as the one place its characters are honest. Clive Owen plays Thackery as brilliance sustained by cocaine, and Andre Holland is better still as Algernon Edwards, a Paris trained surgeon running a clinic in the basement because no white patient will let him near them.

What lets it down is everything outside the hospital. The administrator's plot about brothels and graft belongs to a lesser show, the romance writing is flat, and the second season resolves its lead with a gesture instead of an argument. Cinemax cancelled it and the promised reinvention never came. Watch it for the surgery and the camera, and forgive the rest.