“Eric” review: Benedict Cumberbatch's missing-kid thriller can't find the point

The Oscar nominee plays a troubled puppeteer in Netflix's convoluted limited series.

Some trailers give too much away. The trailer for Eric leaves the real story out. Advertised as a drama about an alcoholic puppeteer (Benedict Cumberbatch) being driven to the brink of madness by his son’s disappearance, Netflix’s new limited series from Abi Morgan (The Hour) has a complex exploration of racial inequality and capitalist oppression nestled inside its fuzzy-monster-puppet exterior. By attempting to connect the two tales, Morgan diminishes the effect of each, leaving viewers with an overly complicated narrative that nonetheless comes to a predictable conclusion.

After overhearing yet another nasty fight between his parents, Cassie (Gaby Hoffman) and Vincent Anderson (Cumberbatch), 9-year-old Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) leaves his New York City apartment for school one morning — but he never arrives. The year is 1980-something, and Manhattan’s streets simmer with risk and the stench of days-old garbage. Homelessness is at crisis levels, prompting a plan from Deputy Mayor Richard Costello (Jeff Hephner) and several of his wealthy supporters — including Vincent’s father, Richard (John Doman) — to “clean up” the city by forcibly relocating its unhoused residents.

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Assigned to the Anderson’s case, Detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) surveys potential suspects, including George (Clarke Peters), the kindly super in Edgar’s apartment building, and Alex Gator (Wade Allain-Marcus), the owner of a seedy club nearby who Ledroit knows and distrusts from his days on the Vice squad. Even Vincent can’t escape scrutiny. His erratic, alcohol-fueled behavior — both at home and on the set of Good Day Sunshine, the Central Park-set children’s show he created — only worsens after Edgar goes missing.

Related: Benedict Cumberbatch is a troubled puppet master in new Netflix series Eric

Initially, Eric is Vincent’s story. The title comes from the name of a new character — a 7-foot-tall monster with shaggy blue fur and a gravel-growl voice — Edgar developed with the hopes that his dad would add him to the Good Day Sunshine ensemble. Vincent, distracted by problems at work, was barely listening when Edgar tried to tell him about his creation — but now the puppet is all he can think about. “If I can get Eric on the show, then Edgar will see him,” he tells Cassie in a breathless mania. “And then he’ll know how much we love him, how much we want him to come home.” Vincent, who has a history of mental health issues, is clearly spiraling into a crisis — one that involves hallucinatory visions of Eric himself, who regularly pops up to scold Vincent about his many shortcomings. (Cumberbatch voices the title character as well.)

Of course, Vincent was insufferable even before Edgar disappeared — belittling coworkers, fighting constantly with his creative partner, Lennie (Dan Fogler), grumbling to Cassie about their dormant sex life. He’s kind of a one-note bastard, but characters keep calling him “destructive,” just to make sure we get it. “How do you have everything that you have going on in your life and you still make people struggle to find basic human sympathy for you?” Lennie fumes.

Viewers will struggle, too. It’s a relief when Eric shifts more of the focus to Ledroit, one of the only Black officers in his precinct. None of his colleagues know that he’s gay with a longtime partner (Mark Gillis) at home; when he’s not pressing Ledroit for updates on the Anderson case, his boss (David Denman) keeps trying to set him up with the precinct’s assistant (Erika Soto). Though he was transferred off the Vice squad years ago, Ledroit can’t let go of his hunch that Gator is running a male prostitution ring out of his club, and that it may have something to do with Edgar’s disappearance. Eventually, his investigation brings him back in contact with Cecile (Adepero Oduye), a Black woman whose teenage son, Marlon (Bence Orere), has been missing for 7 months — and the police, it seems, have stopped looking for leads.

The burden placed on Ledroit, a true minority in his precinct, is compelling. Cecile berates him for not “pushing hard enough” to make the cops pay as much attention to her son as the Anderson’s white child. Renata (LaTonya Borsay), a lawyer and social justice advocate, admonishes him to “do better” when he brings a Black suspect in for questioning about Edgar’s disappearance. It’s a clever conceit, using the sensationalism of Edgar’s case as a Trojan Horse to examine the terrible, mundane reality of neglect facing missing Black and brown kids. And Belcher summons a controlled intensity as Ledroit, presenting him as a reluctant expert at showing the world only a fraction of his true self. But Morgan, by necessity, must keep bringing the story back to Vincent and his downward spiral — and each time, it's harder to care.

Cumberbatch, who is apparently still looking for his Days of Wine and Roses moment, doesn’t go as over the top bringing his character to rock bottom as he did in Patrick Melrose. (His New York accent, it should be noted, is unexpectedly subtle.) The Oscar nominee plays Vincent as written: He’s an incorrigible jerk. Even learning more about his upbringing by a hostile father and withholding mother (Phoebe Nicholls) does little to soften our view. Hoffman, meanwhile, does what she can with Cassie, who spends most of the series looking drawn and quivering with tamped-down panic.

It takes six episodes for Eric to state what’s been obvious from the beginning: “The real monster ain’t under the bed, Vincent. It’s you.” Morgan ties her yarn in some pretty silly knots to complete the necessary redemption arcs in the finale, which delivers its first of several endings about half an hour into its 52-minute runtime. By then, it's a relief to know the ordeal is almost over. Grade: C-

Eric premieres Thursday, May 30, on Netflix.

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