āEric,ā a limited series premiering Thursday on Netflix, stars Benedict Cumberbatch, wearing an American accent, as Vincent Anderson, a Jim Henson-brand puppeteer, if Henson had had severe mental health issues, a drinking and drugs problem and on top of that was just kind of an angry, egotistical jerk. Henson is mentioned in passing, so we are not supposed to confuse the two, Vincentās beard notwithstanding. (Coincidentally, Disney+ is premiering Ron Howardās documentary āJim Henson: Idea Manā on Friday, which will make that distance clear.)
The setting is 1980sā New York City, in its graffiti ānā garbage prime, and to be fair, Vincent is only one jerk among many. There are crooked politicians, crooked cops, crooked garbagemen, dodgy street people, human traffickers and drug dealers. Vincentās parents, who are rich, are also jerks. The Big Apple, baby! (For balance, thereās a good parent, a good cop and a good street person.)
The engine of the plot, written by Abi Morgan (who created the fine British media drama āThe Hourā), is the disappearance of Vincentās son, 9-year-old Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe), which sets Vincent, his wife, Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann), and missing persons detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) ā Black, gay and closeted in a homophobic environment ā on toward their intertwined individual destinies. Itās not a spoiler to mention that Edgar is on a trajectory of his own.
Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) and Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) play a couple in a troubled marriage whose son has gone missing in āEric.ā
(Ludovic Robert/Netflix)
Vincent is the brains behind āGood Day Sunshine,ā a decade-old puppet-populated TV show, set in a park in an idealized inverse of the city. (It is not funky like āSesame Street.ā) Ratings are slipping and the fate of the show, which exhorts children to ābe good, be kind, be brave, be different,ā seems to depend entirely on Vincent coming up with a new puppet that, says producer Lennie (Dan Fogler), will somehow ābridge the gap between the preschoolers and the elementary kids,ā because āthatās where the cool kids are.ā (Kindergarten, apparently.) Vincent doesnāt like this idea, or any idea not his own, one bit, and cannot help making his displeasure known, in barely veiled or extremely open terms. (He is especially disturbed by the thought that any of his characters might beatbox, which is a poor reading of the times.)
But this is not a story about childrenās television, though the details of the production and the puppetry are convincing enough. Itās a mystery wrapped inside a family drama wrapped inside a a police procedural, tricked out with fantasy element and social issues. These include the AIDS epidemic, the unequal treatment by police and media of Black victims of crime, gentrification at the expense of the poor, homelessness, the sexual exploitation of minors and a dramatically gratuitous, if historically accurate, nod to āthe free Black Americans and the immigrant Irish and German populationsā who were moved from their homes to build Central Park thrown in at nearly the last moment. All that and a full platter of red herrings.
Before his disappearance, Edgar, who is known around the studio and has precocious art skills, drew up plans for a new āwalk aroundā puppet, a furry blue monster he calls Eric ā a blend of a Maurice Sendakās Wild Thing, Sulley from āMonsters, Incā and the Muppetsā Sweetums ā in hopes it will help save āGood Day Sunshine.ā Later, discovering Edgarās drawings, which he had frightened his son out of showing him, Vincent begins both to build the puppet in hopes that by putting Eric on television, it will bring Edgar back, and to hallucinate its presence as a hectoring, critical constant companion. I say āhallucinateā ā and there are passing references to some kind of breakdown in Vincentās past ā but imaginary companions are always functionally real on the screen. Eric is invisible to the world, though never to us; Vincent gets some looks when he speaks to him, usually in irritation, but no one suggests that what he really ought to see is a doctor.
Viewing a man in pain, we are surely meant to feel for Vincent at least a little, but heās so consistently annoying across so many hours, so rude not only to the suits in power but to the people on his team, that you may have trouble empathizing. (That is not how Henson did it.) āHow do you have everything that you have going on in your life and you still make people struggle to have basic sympathy for you?ā asks Lennie, speaking for at least one viewer. The sorry state of his marriage is obviously mostly his fault ā and incidentally responsible for Edgarās disappearance, when he sets off alone, unsupervised, as his parents bicker.
Bamar Kane as Yusuuf, with Alexis Molnar as Tina, is a compassionate man who lives in New York Cityās subway tunnels, in āEric.ā
(Ludovic Robert / Netflix)
Serving as a temperamental counterweight to Vincent is Det. Ledroit, a straight-up good guy, who when not working overtime to find Edgar, is taking care of his partner as he dies from AIDS-related illness. And heās determined to investigate a possible connection with the earlier disappearance, from the same neighborhood, of an older Black child, whose mother (Adepero Oduye, in one of the subtlest of the seriesā many fine performances) haunts police headquarters, looking for help and expecting none. (Oddly, no one suggests a ransom request might be forthcoming, though Vincent is famous and his father is a wealthy developer.)
Cumberbatch has Vincent turned up to high most of the time, but heās surrounded by quieter performances from a first-rate cast. I especially liked Bamar Kane as Yuusuf, who lives in the subway tunnels underground, and is perhaps Morganās least predictable character; Erika Soto as Tina, a sympathetic New York Police Department secretary; the always magnificent Clarke Peters as George, the super of Vincentās building; and Wade Allain-Marcus as Gator, who runs a club called Lux, suspiciously located between Edgarās home and his school, that stands generically for the excesses of 1980s Manhattan nightlife and where many characters will encounter significant plot points.
For a series with puppets, a missing child and a father in need of redemption, there are only a couple of possible endings, however twisted the route, that wonāt have you cursing the six hours you spent getting there ā as sentimental and simplistic as that finish may be. And āEricā goes there, boldly.