Eric was excellent in some ways. Benedict Cumberbatch gave an outstanding performance as a mentally ill alcoholic father. In other ways, the mini series was a disappointment. Unbelievable plot points and too many subplots detracted from the central story.
Eric was created by Abi Morgan, who worked on several series I like such as The Split, River, Suffragette, and The Iron Lady. Those were all British dramas. Eric is set in New York City in the 1980s. It seemed like Abi Morgan turned her focus to the U.S. and wanted to write something that would catalog every problem in NYC in one story. We had questionable parenting, child trafficking, child prostitution, closeted LGBTQ people, the AIDS epidemic, police corruption, mental illness, infidelity, racism, homelessness, nonexistent garbage collection, and probably some I’ve overlooked.

It starts with a missing boy. His father, Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch), was a puppeteer on a children’s show. The show wasn’t doing well, and they wanted to introduce a new puppet. Vincent’s 9 year old son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) was a talented artist. He had an idea for a monster puppet named Eric. His father wouldn’t listen to him.

Edgar’s dad and his mom, Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann), fought incessantly. One morning as they were in the midst of yet another argument, Edgar took off by himself to walk to school. He didn’t make it to school and was no where to be found.
Mom called the police. Detective Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) from missing persons was in charge of the case. From that point the series became as much about Ledroit as the parents of the missing boy. He was a closeted gay cop with a secret partner at home dying of AIDS. He had investigated an earlier missing child case involving a Black boy that was unsolved. Because both boys had been in approximately the same place when they disappeared, he tied to two cases together.

Ledroit was sure the cases were connected to a nightclub run by Gator (Wade Allain-Marcus) where a lot of gay men went for secret sex. In the past, Gator had also been involved in underage sex with boys.
There were crooked cops and corrupt city officials trying to cover up the cases. A related subplot was that the police planned to force all the homeless folks out of the subway tunnels and take them off somewhere so they could gentrify the neighborhood and get rich.
Vincent was on a crusade to find Edgar by taking his idea for the Eric puppet to his show. If Edgar saw Eric as a new puppet, he would come home. Vincent was totally hammered all the time, hallucinating a giant Eric who followed him around.
There’s a lot of uncertainty and suspense involved in the story, so I don’t want to go any further describing it to avoid spoilers. Suspects were detained and then let go. The resolution strained disbelief. There was both tragedy and hope. Bad parents were everywhere.
Individual performances were very good. The cast did their best. But the material they had to work with wasn’t outstanding. It was interesting and kept me watching, so I’m not suggesting it isn’t worth your time to watch it. Take a look at the trailer.
The series was directed by Lucy Forbes. It’s streaming on Netflix.
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