Stream It Or Skip It: 'Eric' On Netflix, where Benedict Cumberbatch is a troubled dad who turns to an imaginary monster when his son goes missing (2024)

It isn’t often that a show has a lead performance that’s so compelling that it overrides some obvious flaws with the storytelling and the other characters. But that may be the case with Eric, a limited series that takes place in 1985 New York and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled children’s show creator who has to deal with the grief associated with his son going missing.

ERIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As a New York City police detective talks about a missing child, Edgar Anderson (Ivan Morris Howe), during a press conference, we see the grieving face of his father, Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch).

The Gist: Forty-eight hours earlier, Edgar is drawing some characters in a notebook. He’s on the set of Good Day Sunshine, the children’s show that Vincent Anderson co-created; we see Vincent and a number of other puppeteers working their characters as an audience of appreciative kids watch.

Edgar waits as the show’s production staff meets. Lennie (Dan Fogler), the showrunner, wants to introduce some beatboxing to the music on the show, and Vincent vehemently objects, citing the fact that the show shouldn’t be chasing trends (it’s 1985, by the way). On the way home, we see examples of Vincent’s biases and anger; we also get glimpses of the rough neighborhood they live in.

At home, Edgar sees a daily occurrence: his father arguing with his mother Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann). It often involves Vincent doing a whole lot of drinking first. And while Vincent encourages Edgar to draw the characters he draws, he doesn’t really listen when Edgar pitches him a new character for the show, a monster named Eric.

The next morning, while Vincent and Cassie try to hash out their fight from the night before (which included some thrown items), Edgar goes off by himself to school instead of waiting for his father to take him. This is the last time his parents see him.

As Vincent, who goes to work with a bleeding cut on his head, expresses more anger by derailing a scene by directing vitriol towards mayoral candidate Richard Costello (Jeff Hephner), who is in the audience. The whole time, he’s ignoring phone messages from Cassie. He doesn’t know until he gets home that night that Edgar never came back from school.

Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), a detective in the NYPD’s Missing Persons bureau, gets the call about Edgar going missing. He interviews the Andersons as well as the building’s super, George (Clarke Peters), who was the last to see Edgar.

Ledroit spends his nights going to a club and investigating a drug dealer named Gator (Wade Allain-Marcus) who just got out of prison and might have connections to a child trafficking ring. At the same time, he sees two corrupt cops shaking down another dealer in the bathroom. He definitely thinks there might be a connection to Edgar’s disappearance, but his boss tells him to stop going to that club on his own.

In the meantime, as Edgar remains missing, Vincent drinks and works more to numb the pain. He also revisits the drawings of Eric that Edgar made. One morning, he wakes up hungover and actually sees a furry monster that looks like Eric, who tells him in a gruff voice, “Didn’t no one tell you? The real monsters ain’t under the bed.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Abi Morgan (The Hour), Eric is somewhat like other missing-child shows, like Dark and Expats, but with a foreboding Fight Club element to it.

Our Take: There’s no doubt that Eric is a grim, dark show. There is a lot about its depiction of a crime-ridden mid-’80s New York, and how Vincent Anderson interacts with it, that makes you want to hide your head under a pillow. Morgan is not subtle laying out Vincent’s demons in the first episode, especially in its first fifteen minutes. He’s angry, to the point where he routinely hurts people he loves. He’s a bit racist, a functional alcoholic, and is prone to spurts of violence. And it’s not like he’s unaware of his shortcomings; after he brushes off the mayoral candidate, he takes the scraps of paper that have Cassie’s messages and makes like two puppets, one of them saying, “I came out like this.”

It seems that most of the characters around Vincent are just there to either humor those flaws or roll their eyes and curse at him when he’s being an asshole. But because Cumberbatch is so mesmerizing as Vincent, we really didn’t seem to care all that much. We’ve seen him play Americans before, but there is something about the voice he uses for Vincent that had our attention. We wonder if he studied Eric Bogosian when he crafted the voice he uses for Vincent, because the voice has that “smug New Yorker” quality that’s Bogosian’s signature.

No matter how he came to his characterization of Vincent, he put together an intense, complex performance that demanded our attention. What we hope is that the story coalesces around this performance, so it doesn’t seem quite as random as it feels in the first episode. For instance, we get that Ledroit’s investigation of the drug dealer has a connection to Edgar’s disappearance, but we’re not quite sure about the connection to the part of the story where we see Edgar interacting with his older, very sick life partner. Sure, an NYPD detective in 1985 can’t really be out without a lot of recriminations and consequences, but we’re not sure what it has to do with the main story.

Then there’s the matter of Eric, which we only caught glimpses of in the first episode. Will we just see glimpses of the monster that’s a product of Vincent’s booze-and-grief-addled mind? Will the monster spark Vincent to become a better person, or will things just get darker? And how much will Eric be a distraction from the story about Edgar’s disappearance? All of that is yet to be seen. But because of Cumberbatch’s performance, we’ll keep watching to find out.

Sex and Skin: Some activity goes on in the bathroom of the club that Ledroit is staking out.

Parting Shot: A shot of what looks like Edgar’s discarded jacket lying in a dark street.

Sleeper Star: We’re not sure how much of a role Roberta Colindrez, who plays Good Day Sunshine puppeteer Ronnie, has, but we liked Colindrez on Vida and she seems to have no problem calling Vincent on his terrible behavior.

Most Pilot-y Line: When George tells Ledroit that “{Edgar] was a good kid,” Ledroit keys in on the word “was”. When the detective asks George to clarify, he replies, “just a turn of phrase.” Wow, that’s quite the non-responsive response.

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s a lot about Eric we didn’t love. But, boy, we loved Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the troubled, grieving father of a missing child. It’s so good it might actually paper over most of the show’s flaws.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.