Steven Soderbergh Will Direct New Cinemax Series ‘The Knick’

Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated Press The director Steven Soderbergh, who said he has retired from the big screen.

If self-proclaimed retiree Steven Soderbergh continues to work any harder he’s going to put himself in the hospital, which maybe was his plan all along. For his latest project since a series of declarations that he was at least stepping away from feature filmmaking, Mr. Soderbergh, the Academy Award-winning director of films like “Traffic” and “Side Effects” and a newly minted Emmy nominee for “Behind the Candelabra,” will direct the first 10-episode season of a new Cinemax series called “The Knick,” set in a New York hospital in the year 1900.

Cinemax said in a news release that “The Knick” would star Clive Owen, whose films include “Gosford Park” and “Children of Men,” and would take place at Knickerbocker Hospital amid “the groundbreaking surgeons, nurses and staff, who push the bounds of medicine in a time of astonishingly high mortality rates and zero antibiotics.” Mr. Soderbergh will also be an executive producer on the series, whose pilot episode is written by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler (“Big Miracle,” “Raising Helen”). Production of the series is expected to begin in New York in September, and it is planned to have its debut next year, by which time we expect Mr. Soderbergh to be committed to a dozen new projects.