Before The Pittwon Outstanding Drama Series at the 2025 Emmys, The Knick was already turning the hospital into one of television’s most riveting settings. Steven Soderbergh‘s series premiered on Cinemax in 2014 and ran for just two seasons, but its ambition still makes it stand out among medical shows. Its doctors work at the edge of scientific discovery, where a breakthrough can come at a terrible human cost. For viewers drawn to tense procedures and complicated physicians, this period series offers a darker look at the profession long before up-to-date medicine made the operating room safer.
The Knickis an underrated show that examines the beginning of contemporary medical science at the start of the 20th century. While few fans of medical dramas would look to these shows for legitimate educational value, The Knick has been praised by both medical professionals and historians for its attention to accuracy. On top of this, it’s an exceptionally addictive binge.
‘The Knick’ Is a Medical Drama That Examines the Origins of Modern Medicine
There is certainly a formula that many medical dramas adhere to, but The Knick is just as unconventional as one would expect from Steven Soderbergh. As a director who is interested in infrastructure and process, Soderbergh was the perfect person to examine the intersections between culture, wealth disparity, race relations, and religion during a time in which those who dared to test the limits of the human body actually felt risky. Although it has now become a more commonly accepted practice, the idea that Soderbergh would direct every single episode of the series, which conformed to his signature idiosyncrasies as a filmmaker, was virtually unheard of. The Knick may have been ahead of its time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s too tardy to hail it as an unrecognized masterpiece.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, messy, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The sincere answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought strenuous to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more right than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most sincere thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most vital.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re shrewd enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are hot, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You utilize humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
The Knick is only loosely based on accounts of the New York medical scene in 1900, where the fictional Dr. John W. Thackery (Clive Owen) is entrusted with serving the wealthy clientele of the Knickerbocker Hospital, all while developing his own research into human anatomy. Thackery’s arrogance and barely repressed addiction to cocaine have made him a volatile figure in the medical community, though he does find a surprising ally in Dr. Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland), a surgeon from Harvard. Edwards has faced the expected racism that a Black man would be hit with in a professional field at the beginning of the 20th century.
Clive Owen’s John Thackery Is a Unique Anti-Hero in ‘The Knick’
Clive Owen as Dr. John W. Thackery in The Knick looking at something off-camera.Image via Cinemax
Thackery is a brash character, expertly performed by Owen, who does not have any sympathy for Edwards, even though he is vastly more qualified than any of the other candidates. However, Thackery needs those within the hospital who are willing to adhere to his strange methods, and forms a tense alliance with Edwards as they lend a hand to achieve each other’s goals. The nature of a racially diverse staff at a high-end hospital speaks to many themes that were critical to this period in medical history.
Medical dramas tend to be rather soapy ensemble pieces that present strong casts of likable characters, but Soderbergh’s genius idea was to turn Thackery into a classic television anti-hero who has more in common with Mad Men’s Don Draper or The Shield’s Vic Mackey than he does with Dr. Robby on The Pitt. Thackery’s interest in the human body is based on intellectual curiosity, not a desire to serve others, which explains why he is so prone to making reckless decisions.
On one hand, Thackery’s insular focus makes him a risky presence in the operating room, as he is willing to test the parameters of his abilities to make scientific leaps forward, and generally doesn’t have any respect for the privileged patients he’s asked to serve. On the flip side, Thackery’s suppressed emotions and objective medical assessments make him a genius who is not blinded by emotion, even if it sometimes takes Edwards’ presence to point him in the right direction.
‘The Knick’ Is Another 10/10 Masterpiece From Steven Soderbergh
The Knick benefits from the way that Soderbergh ensures that it doesn’t look or feel like any other show, and takes its time to incorporate high-profile cases into a serialized storyline. Soderbergh’s attention to detail is so astute that the camera may wander down the hallways of the hospital to catch up on various surgeries taking place, simply to explore the broader environment that Thackery is operating in. There are some visceral moments that showcase the surgeries in process, but the series finds something artful within the durability of the human body, allowing the viewers to experience the same affection for anatomy that illuminates Thackery throughout his journey.
The series is also keen to point out that the show does not take place in a vacuum, and that hospitals have become battlegrounds for hot-button issues; not only does Thackery have to mask his indulgences due to the insensitivity regarding addiction treatment, but Edwards realizes that he’s tasked with saving people who would never offer him the same lend a hand had their roles been reversed.
The Knick’s cancellation was an unfortunate case of an untested network that wasn’t able to reach out to a potentially interested audience. The show aired on Cinemax when the premium network was trying to rebrand itself as the distributor of prestige drama content, but was unable to effectively advertise its intricate premise, despite earning great reviews. It’s a disappointing case of the show being a few years too early, as the dawn of the streaming wars made it more common for cinematic directors to make steep, ambitious shows for services like Netflix and HBO Max, where they were given immense artistic control.
The Knick’s conclusion was crushing because the show had teased an exhilarating future for itself, with rumors still persisting about a potential continuation with Holland as the lead. Although Soderbergh has made great shows since, like Full Circle, The Knick is up there with Ocean’s Elevenand Out of Sight as being one of the best things that he’s ever made. The lost potential of The Knick is still upsetting, but the two seasons that do exist are waiting on HBO Max for Soderbergh fans, television buffs, and anyone who’s interested in a great story.
