Netflix’s eerie puppet mashup, Eric

No one is likely to accuse Netflix’s new limited series Eric of a lack of ambition. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and created by British playwright and TV veteran Abi Morgan (River, The Split), it fairly crackles with aspirational energy. The problem is the series’s utter inability to find a coherent tone. Imagine Mrs. Doubtfire embroiled in a nightmarish conspiracy, and you will have some idea of why Eric fails.

The production drinks from several streams, many of them nourishing. Alas, having drunk its fill, it stumbles into town, weaves a careless circle, and falls dead in the marketplace. The show seems initially to be a police procedural, chronicling the search for a missing 9-year-old in 1985 New York. Allowed to walk to school for the first time, Edgar Anderson (Ivan Morris Howe) has vanished in broad daylight, a victim — or is he? — of the city’s pre-Giuliani lawlessness. Naturally fearing the worst are parents Vinny and Cassie, played with almost superhuman charmlessness by Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann, respectively. In a nod to Gone Baby Gone (2007), one of the series’s obvious influences, the Andersons are revealed in a flashback to be bad parents and worse spouses, hurling obscenities at one another while a distressed Edgar cowers. Might the boy have been taken for his own good, perhaps by the building’s friendly if unsavory superintendent, George (The Wire’s Clarke Peters)?

Investigating this and other possibilities is missing-persons detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), a former vice officer with a mountain of unfinished business. Like many police officers before him, Ledroit can’t help but connect his new case to old ones. Note his eagerness to find Edgar in the Lux, a sleazy club whose owner was recently a criminal target. Other leads will do, of course, and the show’s early episodes feint at involvement by a homeless graffiti artist, Edgar’s wealthy grandfather, and even Vinny himself. In now-typical fashion, the series also makes occasional digressions into Ledroit’s home life, in which his partner, William (a moving Mark Gillis), is slowly dying of AIDS.

Had it contented itself with these elements, Eric might have been a passable if drab entry into the procedural stakes, never mind its rote careening from suspect to suspect or caricature-grade 1980s vibe. (I kept waiting for someone to be related to Tip O’Neill. Or wear mesh.) Though decidedly unappealing as Edgar’s father, Cumberbatch is too strong an actor not to be watchable. Just as important, a lost-child narrative will always offer a certain primal tug.

Lamentably, Eric has in mind far more than mere adequacy. This urge to an out-of-reach greatness is what sinks the show. Vinny’s work, explored in tedious detail, is as a Sesame Street-style puppeteer and writer. Suddenly bereft of his child, our protagonist gets the bizarre idea to summon Edgar home with a special puppet made in his honor.

That Vinny’s notion is fundamentally insane seems not to have occurred to the series’s creators. Nor does the production find a way to meld this Patch Adams malarkey to its otherwise grim storytelling. Instead, the show proceeds down two perpendicular tracks at once, splitting its attention in a way that would have diminished even a far better program. In one plot line, Ledroit chases evidence in a child disappearance case that grows more labyrinthine by the day, encompassing nearly every named character before all is said and done. In the other, Vinny busies himself pitching “Eric” to network executives who have long lost patience with their erratic star. Along the way, he is haunted by an imagined, corporeal version of the new puppet, 7 feet tall and covered in silvery fur. That this twist is pulled straight from Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman (2014) is the least of its troubles. In the hands of Morgan and her writers, the device is neither harrowing nor funny. It is merely tiresome.

And what of the show’s political gestures, oddly “relevant” despite the production’s throwback setting? For all of its missing-kid intrigue, Eric plays at times like a public service announcement on “persons experiencing homelessness” and “institutional racism.” Such matters are important, I suppose, but they feel here like precisely what they are: contemporary preoccupations, artificially imposed. Take, for example, a subplot concerning Marlon Rochelle, a black teenager who went missing a year before Edgar. I will not spoil that unlucky young man’s story, but suffice it to say that he exists to give form to an ideological abstraction. When a black child vanishes, Morgan and company all but shout through the screen, no one cares. When the victim is white, authorities send in the cavalry.

If propaganda of that sort moves you, watch Eric! (Or at least watch Episode Six.) For the rest of us, the show may be most notable as a missed opportunity. There is a place, seriously, for evocative puppeteering content. Spike Jonze’s vital and biting Being John Malkovich (1999) proves it, as does Trey Parker’s startlingly iconoclastic Team America: World Police (2004). Watching Eric’s trailer, I had a brief hope that Netflix’s latest would reach those wood-and-fabric heights. No such luck.

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Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.