Jack Amiel spent two decades writing sitcoms and family films before he and Michael Begler wrote The Knick on spec and found the thing they were good at: period drama built from research, with the blood left in. It remains his one essential credit.
Fi1m perspective
New York, 1900. A surgeon opens a patient in a wooden bowl of a room while students look down from the benches, and nobody in the scene behaves as though anything remarkable is happening. That is the tone Jack Amiel and Michael Begler set in The Knick (2014), and it is the best thing about their writing: the past is the present tense of the people living in it. Amiel has said they bought medical textbooks from 1900 off eBay and read them, and it shows, not in speeches but in how much the series knows and how rarely it stops to tell us.
It was a late turn. Amiel and Begler met at university and wrote sitcoms together through the 1990s, on Herman's Head, Empty Nest and Malcolm in the Middle, then moved to features in the mid-2000s: Raising Helen (2004), The Shaggy Dog (2006), Big Miracle (2012). We have not reviewed them, and the reception at the time was mixed at best. Then the pair wrote The Knick without a commission, Steven Soderbergh took it on, and he directed, photographed and edited all twenty episodes himself.
Soderbergh is the complication. The Knick is the best-looking thing we have seen made for television, and it is hard to separate what Amiel and Begler put on the page from what he did with it. What we can say is that the building is full of people who behave like people, and that the one exception is the centre: Clive Owen's genius addict is the stock figure in a series otherwise short of them, and everyone around him is better written. We found the operating theatre scenes hard to watch and harder to look away from, and the writing is a large part of why: the surgery is treated as work, not as spectacle, and the horror comes from how ordinary it is to the men doing it.
Perry Mason (2020), on which Amiel is credited as a writer and which he and Begler took over running for its second season, is a fair test of the same instincts without Soderbergh. We found the first run handsome, slow and about three episodes too long, with a fine Matthew Rhys holding it together. The period is convincingly built; the plot does not move as quickly as the detail arrives. We have not reviewed the second season and cannot say whether they tightened it.
The career so far suggests that Amiel writes best when the year is doing half the work, and that the year does its best work with a director of Soderbergh's kind behind the camera. Another hospital, another number like 1900 on the title card, and we would clear the evening.
Biography
Jack Amiel is an American television writer, producer and screenwriter. Born and raised in Manhattan, he attended the Fieldston School and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studied history. He began his career writing for sitcoms in the 1990s and has worked frequently with writing partner Michael Begler.
Amiel and Begler co-created the Cinemax period medical drama The Knick (2014–2015), serving as showrunners and writing the majority of its episodes. They also wrote the screenplays for the feature films Raising Helen (2004), The Prince & Me (2004), The Shaggy Dog (2006) and Big Miracle (2012). In 2021 they joined Perry Mason (2020) as showrunners and writers for its second season.
