TV shows we love: Eric

I am not really a fan of Benedit Cumberbatch’s acting. He always seem to play the same character, stuck on the right (or wrong?) side of the UK’s class divide. But in Eric, all that changes.

Vincent (Cumberbatch) seems to have it all: a job he is good at and thrives on, a cool apartment (albeit in a somewhat run down part of New York), a wife and a child who seems to love him. And rich parents.

But all is not what it seems. There are tensions between Vincent and his son, Edgar, as there were between Vincent and his own father when he was growing up, a man who still seems incapable of love.

When Edgar goes missing on the walk to school one morning (a walk which he should not have taken alone as a nine-year-old), Vincent and his wife Cassie find their lives turned upsidedown. And Vincent also finds his way back to the bottom of a bottle, losing his job and moving out of the apartment.

In this state though he converses with his inner demons in the form of a lifesize puppet Eric, based on his son’s drawings of the monster under his bed. The same puppet has been brought to life by the TV show Vincent worked on in the hope of reaching out to the boy and seeing him return.

From the depths of despair, and this six-part Netflix show takes viewers into the underworld of New York and the lives of the homeless, Vincent sets out to find his son by following a series of clues left by the child himself. The investigation takes both Vincent, his wife and the police into the bowels of New York in the 1980s, into one seedy nightclub in particular and touches on how homosexuality was seen at the time. Using the disappearance of a rich white child, it also highlights racial inequality.

In his journey Vincent hits rock bottom but also beats the police – particularly a missing persons cop also fighting inner demons – at their own game. In the end it is his love, and that of Edgar that shines in a show about relationships and what we do to each other.