Benedict Cumberbatch impresses in brave but flawed 'Eric'

If Netflix were taking more risks with its original drama content instead of churning out endless middling, safe-bet fare that ticks genre requirement boxes and attempts to satisfy all tastes, there’d be little to say about Eric-creator Abi Morgan’s ambitious but flawed, gloomy new genre-bending drama series.

But in the post-peak-TV age of low-risk, blandly familiar, cookie-cut-out shows, Morgan’s drama deserves consideration and appreciation for its brave if not always successful attempt to do something different, dark and interesting for a TV universe in need of some serious reinvigoration.

Thanks to strong writing, excellent performances and a determination to play against its genre expectations in the service of a broader critique of the social hypocrises of its setting and era, Eric manages to breathe new life into a tired crime drama formula, offering a blueprint for ways that genre shows can do more than merely meet the expectations of an algorithm.

Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Vincent Anderson, a brilliant but not very likeable puppeteer who's found 1980s television success as the co-creator of a successful Sesame Street-style children’s show called Good Day Sunshine. Difficult to work with, arrogant, stubborn and alcoholic, Vincent is anything but sunny. At home with his wife Cassie (Gaby Hoffman) and much to the increasing fear of his son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe), he’s even worse.

One 1984 morning, in a pre-gentrified, grimy, unequal and dangerous New York — after another wine-fuelLed blowout between his deeply unhappy parents — Edgar walks to school alone, and disappears.

The police, led by an embattled, closeted, black detective, Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), are called to investigate.

Vincent, already on shaky emotional ground, veers off the rails as he becomes obsessed with his son’s drawings for a puppet monster named Eric.

Convinced that if he can make his son’s creation a reality and put the character on his show, Edgar will return home, Vincent becomes consumed to the point that he drives everyone in his life away and finds solace in an imaginary relationship with Eric that sees him take a journey into deep, dark, personal disintegration far from the happy comforts of the world of his sunny children’s TV show.

If Eric had only been a show about the emotional and psychological trauma of a parent torn apart by the disappearance of his child, it would have been a solid, emotionally engaging drama that, without bending rules, delivered on its promises. But Morgan has something more ambitious in mind.

It soon becomes clear that the show aims to critique more than its unlikeable central character. With a strong sense of place and setting — a New York beleaguered by rampant inequality, homelessness and crime in the era of police corruption and AIDS fearmongering — Eric takes on more than the mystery of a child’s disappearance.

It's hard to watch the characters implode in the face of Edgar’s disappearance. The mystery of what might have happened to him becomes a vehicle for an exploration of bigger issues: racism, homophobia and capitalist greed — and the ways in which these have created an environment where innocent children become victims of a corrupt system they don't have the power to change.

Playing against type, as he did in 2018’s equally disturbing childhood trauma, the drama Patrick Melrose, Cumberbatch — who also serves as producer on the show — offers a stellar performance that makes Vincent a troubled but engaging vehicle for driving the show to its slightly sappy resolution.

Though the conceit of literalising Eric has been used to sell the show, it turns out that in light of the strength of the writing and acting, this is one of the weaker elements of the series — and Eric becomes an unnecessary distraction.

It’s also unfortunate that because Morgan wants to use the missing-child premise as a tool for a wider, hard-hitting social critique, the show feels burdened by its ambition to the expense of a core focus on Vincent’s psychological decimation and journey toward recovery. There's too much going on in moments when the drama would remain satisfying without the addition of twists and turns that, though they open new avenues to explore broader social ills, don’t always work on a story level.

In spite of these problems, there's something unique about a show that should be applauded for the strength of its writing, acting and evocation of place and time, as well as for aiming beyond the confines of its procedural premise. It may not hit all its targets, but in an era of by-the-numbers drama, its flawed but interesting attempts to go for broke make up for moments when, like its drunken, emotionally lost protagonist, it stumbles.

• Eric is streaming on Netflix