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The Knick - Season 2 - Fridays on Cinemax

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus


After a radical* and transcendent* first season, Cinemax's acclaimed drama series, "The Knick" returns on Friday, October 16 at 10/9c. Steven Soderbergh* and Cliff Martinez* return to once again direct and score (respectively) all 10 episodes of the second season. Written by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler, and Steven Katz, the show stars Clive Owen as a brilliant doctor who works at the groundbreaking Knickerbocker Hospital in the early 1900s.

New York City, 1901: The Knick faces an upheaval, as Dr. John Thackery’s absence (due to his hospitalization for cocaine addiction), a dearth of affluent patients, and financial missteps have led to the board’s decision to shutter The Knickerbocker Hospital in favor of a new building uptown. In this world of corruption, invention and progress, everyone is searching for the new path that will help him or her survive. Whether it’s a path toward justice, freedom, love or just plain survival, nothing comes easy.

As relocation plans proceed, the gifted but under-appreciated Dr. Algernon Edwards jockeys to become Thackery’s successor as chief of surgery, while fellow doctors, nurses, nuns and administrators grapple with challenges at work and in their private lives.

Cast
Main cast:
- Clive Owen as Dr. John Thackery, a brilliant but drug-addled surgeon.
- André Holland as Dr. Algernon Edwards - a gifted, Harvard-trained surgeon, who faces opposition and bigotry among his peers.
- Eve Hewson as Lucy Elkins. A once naïve young nurse, she has seen her personal and professional veneer hardened by heartbreak.
- Juliet Rylance as Cornelia Robertson, former head of the hospital’s social welfare office and chair of the hospital’s board of trustees.
- Jeremy Bobb as Herman Barrow, an obsequious, deceptively greedy hospital administrator.
- Michael Angarano as Dr. Bertram “Bertie” Chickering, Jr., who has grown from an eager surgeon-in-training to a talented doctor.
- Chris Sullivan as Tom Cleary, a jovial Irish ambulance driver.
- Cara Seymour as Sister Harriet, an Irish Catholic nun.
- Eric Johnson as Dr. Everett Gallinger, an aspiring, disgruntled surgeon.
- David Fierro as Jacob Speight, a health department inspector.​
Recurring cast:
- Maya Kazan as Eleanor Gallinger, the troubled wife of Dr. Gallinger.
- Grainger Hines as Captain August Robertson, Cornelia’s father and the leading benefactor of The Knick.
- Tom Lipinski as Philip Showalter, Cornelia’s husband.
- Michael Nathanson as Dr. Levi Zinberg, chief surgeon at Mt. Sinai, and Thackery’s rival.
- Perry Yung as Ping Wu, a Chinatown druglord.
- Arielle Goldman as Genevieve Everidge, a fiery young journalist.
- Andrew Rannells as Frazier H. Wingo, a renowned architect.
- Emily Kinney as Nurse Daisy Ryan.​


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Videos and Articles





Reviews

Matt Zoller Seitz said:
First 4 eps of The Knick season 2 are unsurprisingly excellent, and Soderbergh's direction is next-level imaginative.

Entertainment Weekly said:
Moments that should be personally affecting are often used to illustrate historical truths instead.... But these characters are still fascinating case studies for the mind-body connections we make as viewers: They’re better appreciated with the brain than the heart.


Promo Photos


 

Jarnet87

Member
Fargo on Monday, The Knick on Friday. TV is baking.

give me moar. Moar thack, moar sniveling barrow, moar ping wu.
 

Arondight

Member
Excited. Nice OT>

Show was pretty bleak in the first and basically has everything. Being Darker this season would be amazing to watch.

More Ping Wu would be great. Herman should have stuck with Collier. Far more predictable and not like he didn't deserve what he got either.

I'm most interested to see how Bertram changes from the end after his disillusionment of Thackery.
 
Probably my favorite television series last year. I'm very excited for season 2. It's one of the few shows where every part of it is exceptionally made. A true delight.
 

Mario

Sidhe / PikPok
I had no real desire to watch this show until I channel surfed into the exact opening seconds of episode 1 of season 1 at the start of a catchup marathon. Hooked within minutes, and stayed to watch the whole season.

Great experience, great show, and can't wait for the second season (starts on the 22nd here in NZ).
 
Aaaaaaahhhhh it's the glorious fall TV season. Too much to go around, embarrassment of riches, but this one's the crown jewel for sure. God I've missed this show.
 

JDSN

Banned
I cant wait, I sold the show on all my MD friends based on how Thack figured out the solution to the Abruptio surgery last season.
 

Kvik

Member
Best TV of 20154 returns!

Nurse hotstuff is looking as hot as ever.

What are the chances Thackery will do a speedball by episode 5, and doing some epic surgery right after?
 
from Matt Zoller Seitz:

On The Knick set with Steven Soderbergh, binge director


His direction of The Knick is unusual in pretty much every imaginable way, but let’s start with the fact that it’s all his: Soderbergh helmed the entirety of the show’s first ten-episode season, which aired late last year, and did the same for season two, which premieres on October 16. For all of its visual evolution in recent decades, TV is still a writer-producer’s medium where series directors rotate in and out as needed, rarely overseeing more than two or three episodes in a row. Occasionally one person might direct eight back-to-back episodes of a limited-run project like The Honorable Woman (Hugo Blick) or True Detective’s first season (Cary Joji Fukunaga). And once in a great while you’ll see the majority of a long-running series directed by a single person, as with Louie (Louis C.K.) — but rarely on a show with as many moving parts as The Knick, and in such a punishingly tight time frame. Soderbergh has now directed 20 hours of a lavish costume drama at the speed of a run-and-gun indie film: Both seasons wrapped, according to The Knick co-creator and co-writer Jack Amiel, in about 150 days, “which is less time than a lot of crews would spend shooting one big movie.” The Knick shoots eight to nine script pages a day, double the typical rate for a TV drama, and burns through an hour-long episode in just seven days, versus the industry norm of ten to 14.

Soderbergh shoots with a handheld camera, sometimes while being pushed by grips on a small, wheeled platform that he calls a “dolly du derrière.” This allows him to participate in scenes as an equal with his actors, rather than being “50 feet away, behind the monitor,” he says. “I like the intimacy of that, and I think the actors like knowing how close I am.” Watching him direct is akin to witnessing an athletic performance. Soderbergh walks, jogs, runs, sits, lies on the floor, and hangs half off dollies while PAs grip his ankles. “When I tell other cameramen what goes on with Steven, they’re flabbergasted,” says Soderbergh’s longtime second cameraman, Patrick O’Brien, who works on only about 30 percent of The Knick — usually when Soderbergh needs him to gather extra close-ups in a scene with a lot of characters, operate a crane that he’s sitting on, or shoot the other side of a two-person conversation. “He’s like a dancer,” says Holland. “One time, on the first season, it was bitter winter and we were shooting outside, and he was in this awkward, crouched-down position, holding the camera and moving at the same time, and midway through the take, his knee gave out and he jumped up and winced in pain. You could hear a pin drop, because you know that his physicality is such a huge part of the show.”
 
Yes yes yes absolutely adore this show and can't stop praising it. Got my mom into it. I need to show it to my dad too, he's a doctor. I think he'll love the electricity cauterising stuff cause I've seen him use it in surgery and for him to see how bad it was back then would be great.
 

RatskyWatsky

Hunky Nostradamus
Reviews:

Speinwall said:
Almost every scene demands that the viewer asks why it was presented in that particular fashion--not in a way that distracts from the narrative, but only helps convey the themes of the piece. And as the series jumps ahead to 1901, it's becoming more ambitious in those themes and its articulation of them.

RogerEbert com said:
The Knick is the most detailed show on TV, but by grounding the characters in timeless themes--addiction, class, race, desire, competition--the show transcends its undeniable craftsmanship to become something even greater, something uniquely incredible in today’s TV world. In arguably the best year of television to date, it still stands out.

Slate said:
The first season of The Knick occasionally gave these characters too little to do, while the second season--at least through its first four episodes--feels like the writers have overcompensated and thrown a few too many balls in the air.... It’s easy to treat the past as a cozy prequel to the present; The Knick treats it as a ghost story. I don’t know if that makes for more honest history, but it makes for amazing television.
 
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