Modern medicine had to start somewhere

With everyone in your Facebook friends list spamming your news feed with "Game of Thrones" and "Daredevil", it's hard to remember that they aren't the only shows out there worth watching. Television right now is in a golden age and quality shows are popping up every month. The only downside to this is that sometimes the sheer amount of content makes you overlook the best ones. "The Knick" is a prime example of this.

Over the course of 10 episodes, the first season of "The Knick" follows Dr. John W. Thackery, a brilliant turn-of-the-century surgeon working at New York City's Knickerbocker Hospital in the early 1900s. He is brash, unpredictable and somehow always comes up with the right solution to the problem. Basically he's the embodiment of every clichéd main character ever… for the first 30 minutes. Then you see him injecting cocaine up his legs before every surgery. Clive Owen ("Children of Men") perfectly plays the tragic role of a pioneer striving for breakthroughs in the field of medicine who can't operate unless he's high on cocaine all the time.

Another great performance is by relatively unknown actor André Holland in his role of Dr. Algernon Edwards, the talented new African-American surgeon in the Knickerbocker. Since this is the 1900s and since this hospital is run by white people for white people, things don't exactly go well for him. But instead of using the extremely overdone 'meek black person overcomes adversity' trope, "The Knick" goes in a different direction. Stuck in a society where he feels he doesn't belong, where his peers don't respect him and his patients won't let him touch them, Dr. Edwards slowly spirals into a state of self-loathing, a descent that ties well with that of his colleague, Dr. Thackery.

The individual performances are brilliant, but what clearly sets "The Knick" apart is the direction and production design. All 10 episodes were directed by the same person (a rare thing), and that too by Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh, (or as everybody knows him, the guy who directed Ocean's Eleven). And it shows. The cinematography in every episode is beautiful, with the warm aura of natural lighting clashing with the blinding fluorescent light of the operation theatre, which actually looks like a theatre with the jumpy, dilated-eyed Thackery as the main performer. The soundtrack choice is also inspired, with the showrunners scrapping the dull orchestral music commonly associated with period pieces and instead opting for electronic music. A bold move which paid off really well. 

The main theme of "The Knick" is about talented people going down a path of self-destruction because of things that are in and beyond their control. Needlessly to say, this show gets very, very bleak. So if you can stomach that, you are in for a truly fantastic experience. Highly recommended.