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View Full Version : The Knick (Season 1)



Watashi
08-09-2014, 06:31 PM
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-waJ4W_3Mnxk/U7awgahE7QI/AAAAAAABcOg/39eyaxiP7EE/s1600/the-knick-cinemax-poster.jpg

Anyone catch it last night?

So good. This might usurp Hannibal as TV's go-to queasy drama.

Loved Soderbergh's direction and attention to detail. Cliff Martinez's score is awesome as well.

Watashi
08-10-2014, 08:48 AM
Seriously, watch this shit. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItBAXOEE8Vk)

transmogrifier
08-10-2014, 09:34 AM
Steven Soderbergh is bad at retirement.

EyesWideOpen
08-11-2014, 03:33 AM
Seriously, watch this shit. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItBAXOEE8Vk)

I really want to watch this show but I'm not going to watch one episode and then have to wait a year for it to come out on dvd or streaming.

Irish
08-11-2014, 06:45 AM
Ostentatious. The camera and the soundtrack operates on a completely different level than everything else in it. Soderburgh is so in love with the technicals that sometimes I think he forgets he's supposed to be telling a story. With people in it.

This first episodes plays like it was contractually obligated to hit every 19th century social note. Here's a little racism, a dash of sexism, a few dollops about immigration and child labor. Yadda and snore. I thought the precursor to this might be House or ER or maybe something like Call the Midwife. But nope. I suspect every story beat is straight out of MASH. It certainly felt familiar, and dull.

The series has room to grow but I wonder if anyone will stick around. I might, but with the sound off. Soderburgh annoys me with his showiness but even I'm not so grumpy I can't admit that, sometimes, here and there, he puts on a helluva show.

amberlita
08-12-2014, 04:44 AM
Ostentatious. The camera and the soundtrack operates on a completely different level than everything else in it. Soderburgh is so in love with the technicals that sometimes I think he forgets he's supposed to be telling a story. With people in it.

Hit the nail on the head. Which of these character's stories am I supposed to be interested in following after this opening episode? Owen's character, because he's a misogynistic racist brilliant drug addicted surgeon *yawn.seen.it*? Or the black surgeon and the nurse because they are oppressed by him? Soderbergh seems to have the impression that he has our buy-in to care simply because of our inherent fascination at the horrors of pre-modern surgical technique.

I don't want to see him taking short cuts to character development, like throwing the reveal of a drug addiction on two of the surgeons with a grandiose monologue immediately after one's suicide to make sure we understand how oh-so-tortured! doctors are. It would have been far more effective if, for example, that pregnant lady's fate had come at the end of the episode with its repercussions rather than in the opening 5 minutes.

I'll continue to watch hoping this goes someplace genuinely interesting. But as cool as the surgical scenes are, I'm not very interested in a series of surgical set-pieces where the only thing that is actually developing is a new revolutionary surgical technique rather than actual character.

The imagery is not as impressive as Soderbergh thinks it is anyway. This is the sort of show that looks more striking cut into a trailer than actually watching the episode.

On a positive note: I like how he is depicting the surgical scenes. They are icky without being genuinely gorey. Soderbergh wisely just drops the score in those scenes and lets the silence punctuated by squishy noises of hands digging into bellies do the talking.


also: i'm sort of oddly irritated that the Martinez clearly cribbed some of this show's music from the Contagion score.

number8
08-13-2014, 03:40 AM
Ironically, I really like the camerawork and the soundtrack, but not much else. This is one of the most uninteresting pilots I've seen in a while. A complete grab bag of cliches with absolutely nothing original or dramatic in sight. What the hell, Sodie?