Hey kids! It's time for soul-crushing cynicism! With puppets!
It's hard to wrap your head around the image of seeing noted English thespian Benedict Cumberbatch, sporting a growling New York accent, sprinting full-speed down a sidewalk in rubbish-strewn Brooklyn in a huge puppet costume.
Yet, in 'Eric', it's barely the strangest thing going. More to the point, it makes sense. The new miniseries, written and created by Abi Morgan who previously oversaw BBC's excellent 'The Hour' and co-wrote 'Shame' with Steve McQueen, is solidly plotted. Benedict Cumberbatch is a heavy-drinking puppeteer in an all-singing, all-dancing children's show called 'Good Morning Sunshine'. He's the type of frustrated genius who gets into frequent fights with his co-workers, blasts his producers with invective, and is generally too caught up in his own world to see what it's doing to everyone around him. Meanwhile, his on-screen wife, the brilliant Gaby Hoffmann, finds herself seeking comfort in the arms of another man while trying to be a mother to their child. When the child disappears, their lack of parenting and self-absorption is put into sharp focus.
Right there, you've got the basis of a pretty decent show about terrible parents losing their child to disappearance and learning to cope with it, but 'Eric' begins to grow and grow - much like the furry character that Benedict Cumberbatch begins to hallucinate as a way of dealing with his guilt. The titular creature was his son's creation, whom Cumberbatch believes that by putting him on TV, will confirm to his son - wherever he is - that he still cares, and wants him to come home. Again, there's enough there, but the thing keeps growing, taking in homophobia and the AIDS crisis, rampant corruption in '80s New York, institutional racism, underground homeless communities, and that's not before the story that surrounds the kidnapped child.
Benedict Cumberbatch is front and centre, displaying a willingness to be as unlikeable and hateful as he can be. He's a shitty father, a terrible husband, he's egotistical in his work, and his willingness to use his own grief to help his career is shameless. Yet, you're absolutely wrapped up in it. Gaby Hoffmann equals Cumberbatch for nuance and complexity, really allowing the worn and ragged nature of their relationship to bubble up in the most honest and authentic ways. When they start to bristle and snap, it looks and sounds like they've known each for years and are fed up with one another's crap. There's a lived-in quality to it all, helped by the wonderful production design and the choice soundtrack of clunky, forgotten pop hits from the decade.
Much like James Ellroy's work, 'Eric' spins up this massive web of evil and cynicism, with characters intersecting and diverging with one another across separate storylines, all while it builds and builds to a shocking crescendo that never quite lands as it should. The issue with 'Eric' is that there's more than enough to go on in one of its many subplots and side alleys, and it could have made for a more harmonious and lucid story that stuck the landing and got its ideas across. Indeed, 'Eric' could have easily been chiselled into something efficient and taken in a feature length story, not a six-part miniseries. It's not to say that it doesn't hold your attention or that it lacks for depth and detail, but it spends so much time in reaffirming its themes and atmosphere that it begins to bear down. After all, it's a story about a missing child with terrible parents in a filthy city in a grim decade. There's only so much you can withstand before it crushes you.
All episodes of 'Eric' are available on Netflix from May 30th.