It’s not often that a show has a lead performance that is so compelling that it overrides some obvious flaws in the storytelling and the other characters. But that may be the case with Erica limited series that takes place in 1985 New York and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled children’s show creator who has to deal with the grief associated with the disappearance of his son.
ERIC: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: As a New York City police detective talks about a missing boy, Edgar Anderson (Ivan Morris Howe), during a press conference, we see the grieving face of his father, Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch).
The essence: Forty-eight hours earlier, Edgar is drawing some characters in a notebook. He is on the set of Good morning darling, the children’s show that Vincent Anderson co-created; We see Vincent and other puppeteers performing their characters while an audience of grateful children watches.
Edgar waits while the show’s production staff assembles. Lennie (Dan Fogler), the showrunner, wants to introduce some beatboxing into the show’s music, and Vincent vehemently objects, citing the fact that the show shouldn’t follow trends (it’s 1985, by the way). On the way home, we see examples of Vincent’s prejudice and anger; We also get a glimpse of the tough neighborhood they live in.
At home, Edgar sees something everyday: his father arguing with his mother Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann). It often involves Vincent drinking heavily first. And although Vincent encourages Edgar to draw the characters he draws, he doesn’t really listen when Edgar proposes a new character for the show, a monster named Eric.
The next morning, as Vincent and Cassie try to resolve their fight from the night before (which included some thrown objects), Edgar leaves for school alone instead of waiting for his father to take him. This is the last time his parents see him.
As Vincent, who goes to work with a bleeding cut on his head, expresses more anger by derailing a scene by directing vitriol toward mayoral candidate Richard Costello (Jeff Hephner), who is in the audience. He ignores Cassie’s phone messages all the time. He doesn’t know until he gets home that night that Edgar never returned from school.
Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), a detective with the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau, receives a call about Edgar’s disappearance. He interviews the Andersons and the building’s superintendent, George (Clarke Peters), who was the last to see Edgar.
Ledroit spends his nights going to a club and investigating a drug dealer named Gator (Wade Allain-Marcus), who has just been released from prison and may have connections to a child trafficking ring. At the same time, he sees two corrupt cops extorting money from another dealer in the bathroom. He definitely thinks there could be a connection to Edgar’s disappearance, but his boss tells him to stop going to that club alone.
Meanwhile, with Edgar still missing, Vincent drinks and works harder to numb the pain. He also reviews Edgar’s drawings of Eric. One morning, he wakes up hungover and sees a furry monster that looks like Eric, who tells him in a gruff voice, “Didn’t anyone tell you? The real monsters are not under the bed.”
What shows will it remind you of? Created by Abi Morgan (The time), Eric It’s kind of like other missing children shows, like Dark and expatriatesbut with a feeling fight club element to it.
Our opinion: There is no doubt that Eric It is a somber and dark spectacle. There’s a lot about her description of crime-ridden New York in the mid-’80s, and how Vincent Anderson interacts with her, that makes you want to bury your head under a pillow. Morgan is not subtle in exposing Vincent’s demons in the first episode, especially in its first fifteen minutes. He is angry, to the point that he habitually hurts the people he loves. He is a bit of a racist, a functioning alcoholic and prone to violent outbursts. And it’s not that he is unaware of his flaws; After ignoring the mayoral candidate, he takes the pieces of paper with Cassie’s messages on them and makes like two puppets, one of them saying, “I came out like this.”
It seems like most of the characters around Vincent are simply there to indulge those flaws or roll their eyes and curse him when he acts like a jerk. But since Cumberbatch is so fascinating as Vincent, we didn’t really seem to care much about him. We’ve seen him play Americans before, but there’s something about the voice he uses for Vincent that caught our attention. We wonder if he studied Eric Bogosian when he created the voice he uses for Vincent, because the voice has that “cocky New Yorker” quality that is Bogosian’s signature.
No matter how he arrived at his characterization of Vincent, he put together an intense and complex performance that demanded our attention. What we hope is that the story coalesces around this performance, so that it doesn’t feel as random as it feels in the first episode. For example, we understand that Ledroit’s investigation into the drug dealer has a connection to Edgar’s disappearance, but we’re not quite sure about the connection to the part of the story where we see Edgar interacting with his older and very young life partner. sick. Sure, an NYPD detective in 1985 can’t get away without a lot of recriminations and consequences, but we’re not sure what that has to do with the main story.
Then there’s the matter of Eric, which we only get a glimpse of in the first episode. Will we see glimpses of the monster that is a product of Vincent’s alcohol-addled, pain-addled mind? Will the monster make Vincent become a better person, or will things just get darker? And to what extent will Eric be a distraction from the story about Edgar’s disappearance? All that remains to be seen. But because of Cumberbatch’s performance, we’ll keep watching to find out.
Sex and skin: Some activity takes place in the bathroom of the club that Ledroit watches over.
Parting Shot: A shot of what appears to be Edgar’s discarded jacket lying on a dark street.
Sleeping star: We are not sure what role Roberta Colindrez plays, who plays Good morning darling the puppeteer Ronnie, yes, but we liked Colindrez in Life and she seems to have no problem calling out Vincent for his terrible behavior.
Most pilot line: When George tells Ledroit that “{Edgar]was a good boy,” Ledroit introduces the word “was.” When the detective asks George to clarify, he replies, “Just one sentence.” Wow, that’s an answer he doesn’t answer.
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. there is a lot about Eric we don’t love each other. But boy, did we love Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the troubled, grieving father of a missing child. He is so good that he could hide most of the show’s flaws.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
