Season 1, Episode 4, “Where’s the Dignity?”
I asked Cinemax (actually its parent company, HBO) how many people are watching “The Knick.” The services that report on the murky, mysterious world of cable television ratings haven’t listed the show since its premiere, presumably because it’s too far down the Friday-night rankings. The official, in-house number I was given was an average of 3.6 million viewers for the first three episodes, which is a good number — especially since Cinemax has only about 13 million subscribers — but comes with a large asterisk: it includes all repeat showings as well as delayed viewing (on DVRs) and streaming. So you can’t use that number to compare “The Knick” to, say, “WWE Friday Night Smackdown” (2.7 million-plus, live, on the same day last week.)
Still, it’s nice to know that someone is watching, because under Steven Soderbergh’s direction, this medical-historical drama is one of the better things on television right now. (And that won’t change over the remaining two months of its run, while the new broadcast-network shows arrive. Trust me.) Friday night’s episode, “Where’s the Dignity?,” was more of the same. The writing and plotting, by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, was sufficient to the task. Everything else was good to superior, and scene by scene, even when the story bordered on melodrama or enlightened piety, the storytelling was believable, engaging, subtle and subtly humorous. That might not sound like such a high bar, but it’s exceedingly rare in TV period dramas.
It’s also rare for characters in cable dramas to be fleshed out in plausible ways — they’re much more likely to show us everything they have at the start and then go through arbitrary, unlikely changes that reflect production exigencies or hurried rewriting. So far the staff of the Knick, the turn-of-the-last-century New York hospital where the show is set, has avoided that fate. When the white surgeon Gallinger (Eric Johnson) — whose attitude toward the interloping black doctor, Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland), has been an interesting mix of pure racism and wounded professional pride — called his rival a “smug bastard” on Friday night, you thought, wait a minute, he’s right — Edwards, the show’s most sympathetic character, IS kind of a smug bastard. Mr. Holland makes us see how smugness and egotism coexist with, are inextricably bound with, Edwards’s reserve and compassion.
A similar thing happened with the diffident young surgeon, Chickering (Michael Angarano), when he brought his father to the Knick. His attempt to impress
the old man didn’t get very far, and when his father said that the staff had scorned the doctor, calling him Bertie, it was another moment when we had to agree — the gentle and apparently tolerant Chickering, the show’s OTHER most sympathetic character, is also timid and ineffectual.
Unfortunately, for another week the show’s most opaque character continued to be its hero, Clive Owen’s Dr. Thackery, pioneering surgeon and hophead. It seems as if the central tension of “The Knick” should be in the relationship between Thackery and Edwards, but Thackery’s side of the equation — a combination of apparently racist disdain and a pragmatic willingness to listen when Edwards is clearly right — has been oddly ambiguous. It might make sense on the page — and certainly history has plenty of examples of men committed to rationality and scientific progress who were also blindly racist — but dramatically, it hasn’t been adding up. And the other Thackery story thread — his extreme personality, his drug addiction and nightly trips to Chinatown dens, presumably with roots in his tragic romance with the now-syphilitic Abigail Alford (Jennifer Ferrin) — has been both distractingly lurid and curiously flat.
Speaking of Alford, a central scene was devoted to Thackery’s reluctant post-operative visit to her. This afforded us a long look at her new nose, still attached to the underarm from which the skin was grafted. (Ms. Ferrin, a real trouper, had to spend the entire scene with her arm held awkwardly above her head.) Thackery looked in on her only because he was nagged by the spunky, quietly upstanding Nurse Lily (Eve Hewson). She also followed him home to the Chinese brothel. Her interest seems to be more than friendly or protective, though it might be more interesting in the long run if it weren’t.
The comic-relief, money-hungry hospital administrator Barrow (Jeremy Bobb) seemed less present than in previous episodes, which was a bit of a relief. He’s still passing off pig ashes as cremation remains and then selling the cadavers. In a funny scene, he and the equally greedy but significantly larger ambulance driver, Cleary (Chris Sullivan), met in the morgue while heading toward the same corpse, leading to a humiliating retreat by Barrow.
It turned out that Cleary wasn’t there to steal the corpse — that of a woman who had died after trying to give herself an abortion — but to give it a proper burial. The subplot involving him and the midwife-nun, Sister Harriett (Cara Seymour), took a conventional, sentimental turn when Cleary, upset by the case of the dead mother, agreed against his own religious principles to help Harriett in her clandestine activities as an abortionist.
Edwards, meanwhile, was summoned to the mansion of his and the hospital’s benefactors, the Robertsons, for a party celebrating the return of Phillip Hobart (Tom Lipinski), fiancé of Cornelia Robertson (Juliet Rylance). There was some predictable cross-cultural byplay as Edwards was introduced around the all-white room; Mr. Holland did a wonderful crestfallen eye-roll as the patronizing Captain Robertson (Grainger Hines) said, “You will never meet another Negro with as much ingenuity and ability as this one.” Phillip was surprisingly friendly and open with Edwards, and then, when Phillip mentioned the possibility that he and Cornelia might move West after the wedding, there was a hint that Edwards’s feelings toward his benefactress might be more than platonic. (Lily and Algie, both pining in secret?) The best thing about these scenes: Edwards being fetched at the hospital by his father, the Robertsons’ carriage man, and being taken in through the kitchen to say hello to his mother, their cook.
It’s been a characteristic of the show so far to place its most dramatic action scenes, the always dicey surgeries, early in the episodes and to end on quieter, more somber notes. It was true again Friday night, when the aneurysm operation the story had been building toward for several weeks took place near the top. It was a solid, tense, funny scene, as Edwards played chicken with Thackery — he suddenly stopped giving Gallinger instructions, forcing Thackery to let him take over the operation, utilizing his own new galvanic procedure. As Edwards gave instructions (smugly) for closing up after the successful procedure, Gallinger slugged him, leading to a reprimand from Thackery — not for punching for another doctor, but for risking injury to his own hands. “Next time kick the man instead,” he said, drawing laughter from the operating-room gallery.
Before that, however, came an opening scene that was, perhaps, the purest reflection of Mr. Soderbergh’s presence as director — strange, both propulsive and claustrophobic, slightly hallucinatory. Cleary, while playing darts, got a high sign from a street urchin and went to a nearby basement. A pen had been set up, and into it Cleary emptied the contents of a burlap bag he had been carrying: a passel of terrified rats. While the rats scattered, a man in the pen began to kill as many as he could by crushing them with his boots, presumably to facilitate gambling on the part of the gathered crowd. The last we saw of the man, he had slipped on a dead rat and was falling. Later in the episode he appeared at the Knick, where Chickering eventually noticed his problem: a leg full of rat bites.
If you’re among the 3.6 million watching “The Knick,” let us know what you think of its progress in the comments. How does it stack up against its current costume-drama competition (“Hell on Wheels,” “Manhattan,” “Masters of Sex”)?