So, I’ve been watching The Knick.

Not the new season, the first one. I don’t know how I’m going to watch the second season once I catch up, because I don’t have access to Cinemax. What I do have is the login information to my girlfriend’s parents’ HBO Go account, which is currently hosting a “special presentation” of the show’s first season.

Anyway. This is a remarkable show. Apparently so remarkable that I’ve started a blog just to write something about it. (Actually, a friend demanded that I start a blog after receiving a few overlong text messages from me about the show.)

This isn’t a review by any means, just a few words about something very particular I like about the show, something that has been increasingly going out of style, I think mostly by accident.

The wide shot.

More and more it seems that modern cinema has relied on close-ups and less on wide shots. I can think of a few possible reasons for this. First, when you’ve paid the big bucks for a famous actor, it might feel a little silly to keep the camera all the way across the room from them. Second, it’s generally easier to understand what a person is saying when you can clearly see their lips.

It may also be that the practice of editing the material on computer monitors rather than old-school editing rooms with giant screens leads to tighter shots, since on a computer monitor you might barely be able to see the faces of characters in a wide shot. As folks “consume media” on smaller and smaller screens, wide shots might reasonably be regarded as impractical. (I wouldn’t suggest watching The Knick on your phone unless you really don’t have another option.)

The overuse of close-ups, however, has an unfortunate side effect: over-editing. If you’re telling your story mostly in close-ups, you have to constantly be cutting to new shots in order to follow the action, and this can be quite tiring to watch.

In The Knick, Soderbergh (along with his editorial team) isn’t afraid to hold on a shot. It’s not always cut, cut, cut of mostly close-ups. He doesn’t feel like he has to tell you where you’re supposed to be looking at any given moment, instead allowing for long takes and often letting whole scenes play out in one single wide shot.

This approach makes for a much richer tapestry. It also awards repeat viewings, because you can’t watch five different people’s faces at once during the course of a scene. On first viewing, your attention will naturally be on the actors who have the most dialogue, which means there is always something happening that you won’t be able to take in. Thus, there will always be something new to see on a second and even third viewing.

It seems to me that letting entire scenes play out in just one or two wide shots should actually be preferential, from a budget standpoint, than the alternative (getting a ton of coverage) because it means less camera set-ups. It also allows room for the incredible production design to take the stage. So this is yet another example of that truism about limitations leading to better and more interesting art. I’m not sure if these choices are the result of budget restrictions when it comes to The Knick specifically, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I know that Soderbergh prides himself on getting things done cheaply. (I have also noticed that this style—longer takes, wider shots, less coverage—is more prevalent in the early seasons of Game of Thrones than it is in the latter seasons, and I strongly suspect that this is due to the increased budget as time goes on. Not always a good thing.)

When Soderbergh does choose to shoot a scene with close-up coverage, he manages to avoid over-editing, and often compensates strongly in the other direction, by holding a shot on one of the characters in dialogue for much longer than is normal. This builds suspense in an interesting way because we find ourselves wondering how the other character is reacting. As viewers, we’re so used to seeing every little reaction that we find ourselves on the edge of our seats when we don’t get the reverse shot that we’re expecting. This has an interesting effect in that it allows us to imagine how the other character is reacting, and this in turn makes us participants in the drama in a way that is usually reserved for novels and other non-visual storytelling mediums where we’re given nothing concrete to look at and are allowed the freedom to manufacture the visuals ourselves. The ability to use one’s own imagination to visualize a story is what many of us love most about novels, and Soderbergh allows for some of this in the way he (and his team) edits The Knick.