Friday, August 08, 2014

'The Knick': Cinemax's Quality Play Opens Its Eyes To Race : Monkey See : NPR

'The Knick': Cinemax's Quality Play Opens Its Eyes To Race : Monkey See : NPR: Cinemax's The Knick is an amazing bit of TV filmmaking: a gritty look at a turn of the century hospital, with explicit scenes showing how brutal early discoveries in surgery and medicine must have been in the year 1900.

But as much as I savored director Steven Soderbergh's innovative way of making a period drama feel modern, alongside Clive Owen's masterful take on a gifted, driven surgeon who is secretly a cocaine addict, my eye was drawn to a different character: Andre Holland's Dr. Algernon Edwards.

Edwards is a gifted, Harvard-trained surgeon who becomes the assistant chief of surgery at the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York, circa 1900. Trained in London and Paris, he takes the job at the insistence of the Robertsons, a wealthy family that bankrolls the institution.