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Steven Soderbergh’s “The Knick” Has Just As Many COVID-19 Parallels As “Contagion”
Made shortly after 2011’s “Contagion”, the period medical series “The Knick” features a disease subplot involving the discovery of asymptomatic carriers, contract tracing, and quarantine.
Last April, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Steven Soderbergh was named the head of a Directors Guild committee that would consult with epidemiologists and generate a “comprehensive guide” to help the filmmaking industry return to work safely. Why Steven Soderbergh? It wasn’t explicitly said, but there’s little doubt that it was because he directed Contagion, the 2011 pandemic thriller praised for its scientific-accuracy that saw people flood to it in 2020 when COVID-19 hit.
A few years after he made Contagion, however, Soderbergh helmed the 2-season, 20-episode TV series The Knick. Set in 1900 and 1901, The Knick is a medical drama centered on a fictional version of the real-life Knickerbocker hospital in New York, when many of the tools and procedures in use today were in the process of being invented. It’s part medical drama, part horror, with few comparisons — it may be the only medical drama where more patients die than are saved — and it’s very much a…
