Steven Soderbergh is, as he always seems to be, a busy man (one gets the sense he would turn into Marge Simpson in “You Only Move Twice” in the absence of work). He’s in post-production on one movie and one possibly movie-like thing, potentially prepping a Panama Papers movie, and producing a second season of The Girlfriend Experience, Scott Frank’s Netflix series Godless, and Ocean’s Eight. So it’s perhaps not surprising that him directing another ten-episode season of television in the middle of this was unrealistic even for him. But that doesn’t mean I can’t still mourn the loss of The Knick.

(SPOILERS for The Knick season 2 are below)

In 2014 and 2015, in the absence of a Soderbergh-directed feature film, we were blessed with around 20 hours of high-quality Soderbergh content in the form of The Knick, a Cinemax drama about a hospital in 1900 New York. Much cocaine was ingested, much blood was spilt, and much Soderberghian goodness was to be had over the course of the show’s two seasons, building up to a season 2 finale featuring several heel turns and, oh yeah, the seeming death of the show’s main character, Dr. John Thackery (played wonderfully by Clive Owen). While that would seem to put a damper on the show continuing, Soderbergh and the show’s creators seemed adamant about that complication not mattering.

(End of SPOILERS)

Following the finale, Soderbergh promised that more Knick would be coming, and that the show was structured as three two-season arcs. He waffled a bit on whether or not he would direct these future seasons, but ultimately settled on yes and seemed confident Cinemax would agree to go along with the plan. Well, so much for that.

Chris Sullivan was one of the more consistently entertaining parts of the show, playing drunken Irish ambulance driver Cleary, who strikes up an unlikely partnership with nun/abortionist Harriet. He’s soon to be the villain in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, but he’s come back to, for the second time, stab all us Knick fans straight in the heart.

While on the red carpet for this year’s PaleyFest (he’s there to talk about This is Us, the uber-popular NBC drama he is now a cast member of), Sullivan was asked by TVLine about The Knick‘s future. This was his answer.

Yeah, I’ve heard it’s done. They were gonna try [to do a third season], but I’ve heard it’s done.

This is, objectively, not particularly surprising news. Generally, a network doesn’t wait until more than a year has passed from a show’s last aired episode to announce that they’ve renewed it (let alone renewed it for four more seasons). And, again, Soderbergh is a busy man, and likely wouldn’t be taking on so many projects if he had hope in The Knick returning. But this news is still a bummer, if only because it flexed directorial muscles in Soderbergh that he wasn’t exercising as a Hollywood director. At least he and the writers got to tell a complete arc (if not apparently their complete story), and hopefully he continues the show’s visual inventiveness in Logan Lucky and Mosaic.

Speaking of Mosaic, we still don’t know a whole lot about the damn thing. What I have been recently hearing about it (and reporting on) has been bits and pieces spilled by cast and crew members, namely longtime Soderbergh composer David Holmes (who will also be scoring Logan Lucky) and goddamn Buzz from Home Alone (he has a name and other accomplishments, but screw you if you think I’m giving up on just referring to him as “goddamn Buzz from Home Alone“). Meanwhile, Soderbergh has stayed pretty mum on it… until now. In an interview ostensibly about Singani 63, Soderbergh said more than Holmes and goddamn Buzz from Home Alone did combined.

There’s this experimental narrative piece that I’m really excited about. HBO wants to put another show like it into production. It’ll be on their streaming platform, and you’ll be able to, at certain design points, follow whatever character you want to follow. There’s a story map, and when you get to the end, you can go back and look at all the stuff you missed. We’ve been working on it a long time. The editorial process has been really tricky, and I think we finally found the structure that works. So this summer they’ll do all the tech testing to make sure that if a million people log in, it doesn’t crash. It’s called “Mosaic”.

Hell fuckin’ yeah. Admittedly, we still don’t know what story is being told here this way, but I guess you gotta leave something to surprise. As a reminder, some of the characters you may be able to follow through this story are played by Garrett Hedlund, Sharon Stone, Paul Reubens, Beau Bridges, Loudon Wainwright III, Jacob Vargas, James Ransome, Bridey Elliott (daughter of Chris), Hail, Caesar!‘s Veronica Osorio, several Knick alum, including Jeremy Bobb, Maya Kazan, and Jennifer Ferrin, and, yes, goddamn Buzz from Home Alone.

But wait, that’s not all! It’s not even all in regards to that article I posted! No, in it, Soderbergh also talked about Ocean’s Eight, which is already providing more entertainment value with its (many) set photos than most movies are able to in two-plus hours. He had this to say about it;

We’re doing the female Ocean’s now. Big names. It’s a good group. It’s going to be good. They’re talking about moving the release up because in this new context, there’s a whole sort of layer to it. Without doing anything, just with the President we have now, there’s a whole new layer to it that never existed before. This group of women deciding to do this thing, and do it themselves, and now it takes on this kind of weight that pre-election it didn’t have.

For those who don’t know, Ocean’s Eight is currently scheduled to be released in spring 2018, despite largely filming in 2016 and likely not requiring too much time spent on visual effects and post-production. So moving up its release date makes sense for more reasons than the political, and I would greatly welcome the chance to see it earlier than a year from now. Until then, I can maybe make do with looking at the set photos of Cate Blanchett walking through New York in a CBGB t-shirt.

So there we have it, the first Soderbergh story which I can’t in good conscience end with Joe Manganiello faux-ejaculating with a water bottle. I will instead end it with Anne Hathaway laughing and holding a knife on the set of Ocean’s Eight.