Talk Therapy: How To Deal With Loss Of Your Favorite Show

There’s a dumb saying, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”

That’s stupid. Sometimes you know exactly what you’ve got, which is why you get super-duper pissed when it’s taken away.

The other day, I finally finished season two of The Knick. It was a blissful experience. More times than I can count, I turned to my wife and said, “Ho-ly shee-it.”

I had to find out when season three was coming so I Googled. It’s not. My heart stopped, more or less, and after resuscitating myself, I was mad. I was mad as hell. I can’t take it anymore.

If you are reading this and you are not putting The Knick on hold at your local library, finding it on your PVR, or streaming it through friggin’ Crave or whatever, you don’t know what you’re missing. I had The Knick. I know what I’ve lost. I’m barely coming to terms with it. I need you to understand what I’m feeling.

You'll miss Clive Owen in a suit with white doctor’s shoes riding highs of pure bliss (possibly fuelled by cocaine) then dredging the depths of suffering (definitely fuelled by cocaine, also, maybe heroin at that point) through old-timey NY boroughs.

You’ll miss a set design that is so lavishly accurate (was everything built with the finest of varnished woods at the turn of the century?) you forget it’s 2017 and sh*t don’t look like that no more.

You'll miss the tension of doctors, oftentimes winging it and other times certain in their procedures, performing operations we know today to not be all that safe. It’s like watching a kid taking swings at a hornet’s nest with a hockey stick.

You'll miss the entrancing, unsettling, and curiously on-point Cliff Martinez techno score set to a period piece. That’s like missing Barry Lyndon set to the score of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Why would you miss that?

You'll miss the most composed colour palette set to a TV series I can think of.

You'll miss the best doctor procedural show (which is saying something considering there's a three new ones greenlight every damn year).

You’ll miss a show that best contemporaries a time period long past, placing its realities firmly into our current landscape in such a way that if Dr. Algie Edwards pulled out an iPhone and started texting, you might not know he’s a doctor in 1905.

You’ll miss the kind of editing that film school courses are built on.

You’ll miss a show that punctuates its big narrative points with the same oomph, vibrancy, and gravitas as Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, but just as often with a subtle turn of the camera from one subject to the next. Red Wedding you say? Addiction treatments, I say (Season One, Episode Ten, final scene)!

You'll miss a show that peels back the layers of our current social norms like nothing since The Wire.

You'll miss a show that grapples with addiction in a more nuanced, biting, and terrifying way than anything other than a David Simon production. (You know what? Suddenly I am realizing just how much this show coincides with The Wire. Two shows that take a standard narrative with the medium - cop show, doctor show - and then elevates it beyond how we comprehend those shows work.)

Also, you’ll miss maybe the best thing Steven Soderbergh has ever done. Which is something.

*sigh* Hot damn, I miss this show.

Rhys Dowbiggin @Rdowb

Rhys has worked six years in the public relations industry rubbing shoulders with movie stars (who ignored him) to athletes (who tolerated him). He likes tiki-taka football, jelly beans, and arguing with Bruce about everything.