Steven Soderbergh’s “The Knick” Has Just As Many COVID-19 Parallels As “Contagion”

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 spiritual sequel to Contagion, equally as eerie to watch now amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

The most obvious parallel, of course, is the outbreak of typhoid fever that Cornelia Robertson, the hospital’s Head of Social Welfare, investigates. When multiple people start to fall ill with similar symptoms, Cornelia and Health Inspector Speight identify the commonality between the cases as the neighbourhood where many of the patients lived. They then speak to many of the people that interacted with the patients, a process we all know by a proper name now: contact tracing. They soon identify Mary Mallon — a cook based on a real person that birthed the phrase “Typhoid Mary” — as a common contact between all the patients.

Then, after locating Mary and isolating her, the plot takes a very 2020 turn: Mary takes Cornelia and Inspector Speight to court, arguing that her freedom is being infringed upon by being forced into quarantine. She has absolutely no symptoms, she argues. “No cough, no cold, no fever. Sick people get sick. Do I look sick to you?”, she asks the judge. Of course, after 2020 and COVID-19, we know that isn’t entirely true. “Simply because Ms. Mallon isn’t showing signs of the disease, it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have it or that she can’t give it to other people”, Dr. Chickering informs the judge. How many times have we heard that this past year?

The Knick is set in 1900, however, and as Dr. Chickering tries to explain, Mary Mallon is the first case of an asymptomatic carrier of a disease they have ever found. Typhoid Mary is set free. As the doctors walk out of the courtroom in defeat, one of them tells the group: “It took 5000 years for people to understand that germs can make a body sick, it’s gonna take some time for them to figure out that they can exist and not.” He’s a bit too on the money, if you ask me. They’re then interrupted by Typhoid Mary. “Go fuck yourselves”, she tells the doctors in her me-lucky-charms Irish accent. “Go wash yourself”, Inspector Speight replies. In 2021, that’s advice to live by.

While the Typhoid Mary subplot seemed like it could’ve been added post-COVID, it’s not the only part of The Knick that sticks out after the year we had. Because much of the science, methods, and procedures we have today were not around in 1900, many of the patients’ afflictions that the doctors in The Knick come across are completely novel. A mysterious side-effect here, a shocking reaction there. Watching the doctors of The Knick work, you can’t help but think that hospitals in early 2020 must’ve looked very similar, with doctors being forced to battle a novel coronavirus, albeit with a lot more PPE — surgical masks were not common practice yet in 1900 and surgeons in The Knick operate on patients without gloves. It feels like a lifetime ago, but there was a time when we didn’t yet know all the symptoms of COVID-19.

Then, of course, there’s the subplot of the hospital’s board and its desire to build a new hospital. The Knickerbocker hospital, you see, is located in one of the poorer neighbourhoods in New York, meaning most of the patients were poor, meaning the hospital makes little money. The board members, while not all money-hungry suits, want to build a new hospital uptown, giving them access to the wealthier patients. On top of class segregation, there’s also racial segregation. There’s hospitals only for Black people and hospitals only for Jewish people, and as you may have guessed, they’re not all equal. In 2020, that unfortunately hasn’t changed much. Studies have identified segregation as a factor in COVID-19 disparities. Non-white people die from COVID-19 at a significantly higher rate.

Period dramas tend to use their historic setting to say something about the present. “These times looked very different, but some things haven’t changed” is the common thread of almost all period dramas. Much of what The Knick is trying to say is not specific to COVID-19 — it aired from 2014–2015 after all — but, if you ask me, that makes the parallels all the more striking. We haven’t really changed much. To borrow the pessimistic final words of the show’s protagonist: This is all we are.