Benedict Cumberbatch's Eric Is A Beast Of A Story

Eric: In Genre-Fluid Praise Of Benedict Cumberbatch

Cumberbatch’s performance puts him firmly in place as an Emmy frontrunner for next year, writes Rahul Desai

ERIC is like nothing I’ve seen before. Its ambition is a sight for sore eyes in the cluttered streaming space. Interestingly, the one-liner itself is familiar. The six-episode mini-series positions itself as typical Netflix crime fiction: A nine-year-old boy goes missing, his troubled dad looks for him, and the investigation uncovers a systemic rot of corruption and complicity. See? Nothing madly original. But that’s just the entry point — an invitation to viewers who are conditioned to expect yet another moody, slow-burning procedural.

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Eric is actually a beast of a story, both literally and figuratively. The beast here is a 7-foot-tall puppet monster, Eric, who accompanies genius puppeteer Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch) in his drug-fuelled search for his missing son, Edgar, in 1980s New York. Eric (also voiced by Cumberbatch), the artwork of Edgar, comes to life as Vincent’s imaginary frenemy — a fluffy embodiment of the man’s guilt and grief. Vincent, the co-creator of a children’s TV show called Hello Sunshine, is convinced that if he designs a new show around Edgar’s vision of Eric, perhaps it will bring back the boy. The figurative beast, however, is this series’ narrative scale. It’s not a father-son anti-fairytale. The puppet monster is the link between the micro and the macro, a close-up and a long shot. Eric — gruff, ugly, funny, weird — is the child’s understanding of a society that reflects and normalises his parents’ dysfunctional marriage. Edgar felt safer on the footpaths of a crime-riddled city than in the hostile confines of his own home.

By revealing Edgar’s whereabouts within a few episodes, the series connects his fate to the cultural decay of New York itself. A kid’s disappearance usually exposes a neglectful family or abusive upbringing. But this kid’s disappearance exposes a neglectful America at the crossroads of stigma, racism, generational trauma, homophobia and institutional abuse. Eric slowly sheds the red herrings, dismantles the mystery, expands its net and roots itself in the ‘background’ noise. At some point, Vincent’s deluded search morphs into the background. There’s the life of the investigator, a closeted Black cop named Michael, who finds himself in the thick of a NYPD-politics nexus and municipal apathy. There’s a buried case of a missing Black boy from years ago, which comes to light in the shadow of Edgar’s status as the white grandson of a wealthy builder. There’s the disillusionment of Cassie, Edgar’s mother, who finds solace in a former student’s arms. There’s an underage sex racket at a shady nightclub that’s frequented by ex-cons, mayors and the social elite. There’s Vincent’s alcoholism and drug addiction, his arrogance at work, his reluctant ‘adventures’ with Eric, his unravelling in the face of scrutiny from his estranged but powerful parents. There’s a Romanian criminal ring, a suspicious Black handyman, a Gotham-like underground universe of the homeless, the murky past of Vincent’s colleague, the spread of AIDS through the persecuted gay community — and so on.

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There’s a lot going on. And while Eric often fumbles in its juggling of tracks, it is always rescued by its big-picture perspective. The subversion of the missing-kid genre is brave. Edgar disappears because of his dad, so it’s almost like the child is making Vincent jostle for space in a story that refuses to glorify his tortured-artist syndrome. The man’s attention-seeking and self-destructive personality clashes with the show’s courage to keep gliding over him and treat an oft-unseen New York as the protagonist. Edgar is indirectly forcing his father to mend his ways and, by extension, forcing the city to do better. What really works is the humanisation of Edgar’s escapism. He draws and imagines, gets lost in the blurred lines between fiction and reality. He’s too young to know that he can’t change or ‘repair’ his dad, so it’s kind of poignant that it takes his invisibility to put Vincent on a path to salvation. At some level, it’s like Vincent’s search for Edgar is a search for his younger self — he’d rather find Edgar before it’s too late than find Edgar before he turns into Vincent. Big Bad Eric is simply a manifestation of that marriage between lost innocence and newfound hope.

Cumberbatch’s performance puts him firmly in place as an Emmy frontrunner next year. The reason he’s so good is because of the very typecasting that we tend to take for granted — he keeps reinventing the language of the narcissistic genius with every other role. Every character brings something different to the table, even if he’s the go-to actor for any male in the slightest vicinity of Sherlock. His Vincent is a cliche that collapses into originality. It’s almost like watching a monster mutate into a man. It’s a testament to his talent that the series is even able to stage a giant puppet as a serious psychological device. It’s such a huge leap of faith that the thematic conceit takes a while to emerge: Eric is the shapeless bridge that connects perception to truth — and childhood gremlins to adulthood demons. He can be the worst of us when he’s in our head, but he can be our voice when he is willed into reality. The series reaches so artfully for the darkness that it’s hard not to look between its Vincents and its starry nights.

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