Netflix’s Muddled Eric Squanders a Pair of Powerful Lead Performances

On paper, Netflix’s Eric should be fascinating: a prestige limited series about a missing child and a father driven to the brink of madness by his disappearance, complete with a hallucinatory giant puppet is the stuff of awards season dreams. The cast is star-studded, the performances are top-notch, the recreation of a derelict 1980s New York brimming with corruption and dirt is uncomfortably accurate. And, don’t get me wrong, there is a good show in here somewhere—several good shows, actually. But there is such a thing as trying to do too much, and in attempting to extrapolate larger social meaning out of the initial premise of one miserable man’s worst nightmare, creator Abi Morgan’s series muddles the message of all of them. 

Eric initially follows the story of Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch), a generally awful alcoholic narcissist who is a bad father and a worse husband. The creator of a Sesame Street-esque series known as Good Day Sunshine, he’s the son of a wealthy real estate developer and his character comes complete with all the psychological damage typically wrought by rich absentee parents as well as a personal determination to both reject and refuse to acknowledge the privilege the luck of his birth has given his life. (Honestly, he’s kind of insufferable, and his lack of self-awareness really hinders the narrative when it comes to building any sort of genuine sympathy for his character.) Though he’s clearly a talented creator, Vincent is often at odds with his coworkers, his marriage to wife Abi (Gaby Hoffman) is obviously crumbling, and he’s the sort of father who can barely bring himself to be present even when standing beside his son. But when nine-year-old Edgar (Ivan Howe) disappears after a particularly vicious argument between his parents, Vincent’s downward spiral goes into overdrive. 

As his drinking worsens and his mania increases, Vincent becomes convinced the only way to bring his son home is to bring his son’s drawings of Eric—a fuzzy, seven-foot-tall, blue and orange puppet—to life on the show he grew up watching. As he steadily builds toward what feels an awful lot like a psychotic break, Vincent begins seeing hallucinations of Eric (also voiced by Cumberbatch) who becomes both his investigative partner in his search for his son and a not-at-all-subtle metaphor for his own self-recrimination and guilt. Cumberbatch has a long history of portraying tortured genius types and is predictably strong here, playing Vincent remarkably straight for a character who spends most of his screen time with a giant puppet. The role is sadly underdeveloped—the reason why Vincent is the way he is boils down to little more than daddy issues, and the show feels remarkably uninterested in his history of mental illness beyond the ways it allows the series’ central conceit to exist—but Cumberbatch makes the most of what he’s given. 

Running in parallel to this plot, Eric also follows the story of Detective Michael LeDroit (McKinley Belcher III), a closeted NYPD detective on the Missing Persons desk and one of the only Black cops in his precinct. His story alone could power a fairly compelling drama in its own right, as he’s forced to hide key pieces of who he is from his colleagues as he cares for a lover dying of AIDS at home (Mark Gillis) and dodges his boss’ (David Denman) attempts to set him up with the office secretary (Erika Soto). Assigned to Edgar’s case, LeDroit’s investigation sees him butt heads with various figures in local government, particularly as he begins to draw connections between the boy’s disappearance and a similar event from several months prior involving a missing Black teen from the same neighborhood that the department has seemingly given up on finding. (That this involves a local nightclub that may or may not be running a prostitution ring and a bunch of grudges from LeDroit’s time with the Vice squad is just another example of Eric making its own story more complicated than it needs to be.)