The Frankensteined Failures of <em>Eric</em>

Nothing has disappointed me yet this year quite like Eric, a series that promises extraordinary actors (Benedict Cumberbatch!), ambitious storytelling about municipal crime and corruption (1980s New York!), and thrilling strangeness (there are puppets!). The trailer focuses tightly on the show’s central mystery: When a 9-year-old boy goes missing one day on the way to school, his father—the misanthropic co-creator of a Sesame Street–style children’s series—fixates on the idea that creating a new puppet will help bring his son home. Layering ABBA songs, frenetic crosscuts, and grim visual fragments, the teaser seems to denote something potentially wild and creatively bracing.

So why is the show itself such a letdown? Over six episodes, Eric is dour, messy, and stuck in a format that’s so well-trodden by crime drama at this point, it’s touching bedrock. The puppets, it turns out, are a quirky misdirect—the equivalent of the most boring man at a party wearing a tuxedo T-shirt. Eric wants instead to be the kind of show that uses a precipitating tragedy and a multifaceted ensemble narrative to parse systemic societal failures, but it lacks the animating anger or the exhaustive intimacy with its setting required to pull it off. Written by the British playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, The Split), the series ends up feeling imitative and unsatisfying. It’s flat-pack, prestige-ish television: easy to assemble from familiar narrative pieces, but fundamentally soulless.

[Read: Prestige TV’s new wave of difficult men]

To the show’s credit, the direction, by Lucy Forbes, is superb. Set in New York during the inflection point of the early 1980s, when the dual crises of the AIDS epidemic and gentrification were beginning to take shape, Eric is immersive and almost nostalgic in how attentively it re-creates the era’s jittery feeling. The backdrop is an erratic landscape of decrepit streets, disco fabulousness, and high-ceilinged apartments with Marcel Breuer chairs. A couple of days before the boy, named Edgar, goes missing, he visits his father, Vincent, at work, on the set of Vincent’s beloved series, Good Day Sunshine; the show’s motto is “Be good, be kind, be brave, be different,” as if to counteract the grim realities that kids are absorbing outside the studio. Vincent (played by Cumberbatch), his hand lodged halfway up a puppet version of himself, smiles with genuine pleasure when he sees his son. Around others, though, Vincent is nasty and sour, scoffing at a producer’s attempts to update the show and muttering sexualized insults at a co-worker. At home, he drinks himself into rages, picks on his child, and slurs hateful things at his wife, Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann). Later, Vincent finds drawings on Edgar’s desk of an alcoholic puppet named Eric: a pathetic, purple, morose monster.

Watching Vincent, I found myself longing for the last time Cumberbatch played a damaged, brittle artist with virulent addiction issues, in Showtime’s Patrick Melrose (which, algorithmically but unflatteringly, arrives on Netflix the day before Eric). Both characters are calcified in self-pity and narcissistic indulgence, but Patrick is mordantly funny, insulating himself from reality with irony and bleak one-liners. Vincent is often simply unbearable, and Eric offers only the thinnest explanations as to why. The neglected son of a wealthy real-estate tycoon (The Wire’s John Doman) who’s razing single-room dwellings to build unaffordable skyscrapers, Vincent seems to have struggled with his mental health, which the show sometimes conflates with both creativity and trauma. Tasked by Cassie with walking Edgar to school one day, Vincent lets him go alone instead. But the boy never arrives.

[Read: Patrick Melrose is a lacerating tour de force]

Over the first few episodes, Eric does exactly enough to remind you of better storytelling, cultural works that tend to be described as “novelistic” on-screen. The era and setting recall The Deuce, David Simon’s HBO drama about the sex trade in ’70s and ’80s Times Square—a show that also used the city as an access point to think about corruption, gentrification, and racism more broadly. Simon’s early-2000s tour de force, The Wire, also seems influential to how Eric weaves together its subplots and supporting characters across the city’s social strata. Ledroit, the closeted cop investigating Edgar’s case (McKinley Belcher III), searches for both Edgar and another child whose disappearance has drawn far less attention; at home, his partner is dying of AIDS. The superintendent for Vincent and Cassie’s building, George (The Wire’s Clarke Peters), has provided refuge to Edgar during his parents’ fights, but is potentially a suspect. The show throws in scheming politicians, corrupt cops, sanitation workers, pimps, predatory reporters, scornful bosses, and—most questionably—a whole city of unhoused people living amid the subway tunnels, who suffer the most from Eric’s minimal characterization and focus on Vincent.

The breadth of the show’s universe is ambitious. Morgan seems to want to draw out the connected extremes of the city that Edgar is being raised in—the wealth of his grandfather drawn from the deprivation of so many other New Yorkers, leaving those stuck in the middle to fight among themselves for scraps. New York, it’s made clear, cares much more about some children than others. But the show’s approach to its ancillary characters can come off as mawkish, a cartoonish and Gotham-inflected portrayal of people as either guileless innocents or grubby, sneering villains. The scenes in the tunnels beneath the city, where a woman nods out as she breastfeeds a baby and a desperate character wonders how much to sell a child for, smack of exploitative prurience. We’re supposed to wonder why we can’t keep all children safe, as the show indicts fighting parents, societal deprivation, and outright evil with the same broad brush. The idealized puppet world of Good Day Sunshine—artificially warm, clean, and kind—points out how far both the city and Vincent have fallen.

But the sloppiness of the story makes it impossible to buy what Eric is selling. Edgar’s parents are supposedly demonized by the tabloid press for letting him walk the two blocks to school alone, as though leaving kids to do things on their own wasn’t a key tenet of ’80s parenting. A crucial plot point hinges, rather unbelievably, on a character getting TV reception via an antenna in a camp deep below the city. The hardest-working delinquent in New York is a drug dealer by day and a pimp by night, as if the show has space for only one menacing criminal. Generally, Eric is vague where it needs to be specific, and sketchy with its characters when they should be finely drawn. The lead actors are terrific, but they can’t animate what isn’t there. Even the ultimate significance of puppets is hard to parse. “What is it about puppets, Lennie?” Cassie asks Vincent’s creative partner in the third episode. “They get to say the things that we can’t,” Lennie replies, a comment that might be meaningful if Vincent himself wasn’t such an uninhibited spigot of insults and id.

I craved more detail, and more humanity, for characters such as Yuusuf (Bamar Kane), a graffiti artist with a Basquiat-inspired crown tag, whom Edgar idolized before his disappearance. Even Hoffmann’s Cassie, who gets a lot of screen time, is given little to do except chain-smoke and sink into thousand-yard stares. Shouldn’t performers this good have more to work with? Cumberbatch’s cantankerous father, as selfish and pitiful as he is, isn’t rich enough in layers to make the many scenes of him swilling vodka and frowning feel worthwhile. Instead, in a city of creeps and monsters, he’s just that most familiar and disappointing of bad guys: a man failing his family.