'The Knick' Season Two Teaser: San Francisco Gets Sick

Here's a gorgeous teaser for The Knick season two, which comes complete with an announcement that Steven Soderbergh's excellent series returns to Cinemax on October 16. Clive Owen and most of the rest of the S1 cast returns, but this time at least part of the story goes to San Francisco along with Cornelia Robertson (Juliet Rylance). We still don't know much about the thrust of this season, though we can expect it to deal with heroin, further competition over medical advances, and gangsters and loan sharking, for starters.

Not that you'll see too much of all that in The Knick S2 teaser below, which is mostly lovely atmospheric shots, albeit ones that have a quiet beauty and sometimes even a grand sense of oppressiveness to them. 

The first season of The Knick featured excellent acting and often sublime direction from Soderbergh, not to mention a visual sense that often verged into daring, even considering the advances in cinematography and editing designed for TV.

This teaser may be brief, but it suggests a real confidence that came out of the success of that first season, with shots that are just a bit more subjective than what we saw last season. And now that all the major characters and their personal and collective dramas have been established, the show can dive right into new stages of conflict and achievements for each.

And while some of the show clearly takes place in San Francisco (there's that shot in the teaser of a quarantine zone in the city which appears to contain at least some Chinese men) it will still feature a lot of New York-set story.

Huber's Palace Museum, for example, seen partway through the teaser, was a real attraction that opened its doors (under a slightly different name) in 1888, and ran until 1910, promising "a dollar show for ten cents," with "one mission natural, historical, oriental, national, antique curiosities" for eager visitors. We can only imagine what visitors find inside in Soderbergh's conception.