Or if, ahem, you have a U.S. IP address. Here it is at YouTube. First one’s free, kid…
The Knick is a new series from Steven Soderbergh — airing on Cinemax — staring Clive Owen as a doctor at a semifictional hospital called the Knickerbocker in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City.
I loved this first episode, at least after Soderbergh got his ode to Skin-emax — that is, some completely gratuitous full-frontal female nudity in first five seconds — out of the way. Owen’s John Thackery is crotchety, brilliant, drug-addicted, and racist, the latter of which we discover when the hospital administrators force him to accept the highly qualified but highly not-white Dr. Algernon Edwards (André Holland) as his new assistant. The clash between them in this first episode (I’m sure there will be more) comes to a pinnacle with a line of dialogue that I think I will probably never forget.
A warning: There’s a lot of medical gore here, and stuff that will simply astonish you when you realize how far medicine has come in a relatively short period of time. Like how rival ambulance drivers literally fight over the opportunity to pick up an ailing person — apparently the hospitals pay a sort of bounty for new patients. Incredible.
I’m very much looking forward to more of this. And not only because of Clive Owen.
We recorded this but haven’t watched it yet. Blood makes me ill, will I be able to watch the first 20 minutes?
In a word, No.