Imaginary friends are a real trend in film and television at the moment, but it’s one critics are hoping screenwriters outgrow soon.
The Blumhouse bear-buddy horror flick, Imaginary (”a grizzly bore,” per this paper’s review), came and went quickly in cinemas earlier this spring, while the family movie, IF, and its plethora of pretend pals (and a 49-per-cent splat rating on Rotten Tomatoes) is still in theatres.
Now, the dark and disappointing limited series, Eric, has landed on Netflix, with Benedict Cumberbatch voicing its title character – a big blue monster who bobbles around creator Abi Morgan’s corrupt and vice-ridden vision of 1980s Manhattan.
Eric springs from the imagination of Edgar (Ivan Howe), a nine-year-old white boy (his race comes to matter) who is the son of a bad-tempered, alcoholic puppeteer named Vincent (played by Cumberbatch in the flesh).
One day, after overhearing a particularly nasty fight between his dad and long-suffering mom, Edgar disappears on a short solo walk to his school.
In his guilt and anguish, Vincent becomes convinced that the only way to get Edgar back is to turn his son’s sketches of his friendly monster pal into a giant puppet and get him on the air as part of Good Day Sunshine, the Sesame Street-style show he co-created.
But, wait, there’s another Eric, too: an animated version who looks like Sully from Monsters Inc. with a slight horn-trim and greying fur. He starts to follow Vincent around and berate him as he falls deeper and deeper into substance abuse.
Vincent already voices his darkest thoughts aloud to everyone around him, so there’s no real dramatic reason for this manifestation of his inner monster. And there’s certainly no need for endless cuts to reaction shots of others characters making a “Who’s he talking to?” face.
Eric takes up a lot of space in the series – and the seven-foot furry just doesn’t leave enough room for the convincing inclusion of everything else Morgan (whose previous British hits include The Hour, River and The Split) wants to cram into six episodes.
Indeed, Edgar’s disappearance is just one strand of a sprawling but superficial story that also tries to be several seasons of The Wire, too.
The other main character is Detective Ledroit (a magnetic McKinley Belcher III), the Black, gay missing persons detective who is assigned to Edgar’s case. He’s navigating a police department where the racism and hom*ophobia is overt – and the corruption isn’t exactly kept hidden.
A previous unsolved case involving a young Black gay teen has Ledroit spending nights at the Lux, a nightclub located halfway between Edgar’s home and school, where a child prostitution ring may or may not be operating.
Further expanding the world of Eric is a city councillor who wants to be mayor and is spearheading a scheme to clean up the streets by bussing the homeless off the island of Manhattan; a sanitation company that may also be involved in dirty stuff down the docks; and, down deep in the subways and the sewers, a growing encampment of down-on-their-luck characters who seem straight out of Charles Dickens (or, in the series’ cheesier moments, Oliver!).
Morgan seems to want to use the 1980s crack and homelessness crises to touch on, at arm’s length, today’s semi-permanent encampments of unhoused people and an opioid epidemic that isn’t even close to being solved.
But in not credibly depicting the American past, Eric has little worthwhile to say about the present, either.
The series certainly has some superb acting, including the great Gaby Hoffmann as Cassie, Edgar’s agitated mom. It’s just hard to get past the eye-roll red herrings, overstuffed story and puppet-depth supporting characters delivering sometimes seriously clunky dialogue.
Surprisingly, given Morgan’s past work on BBC news drama The Hour, the America press are depicted as pure monsters, constantly sneering at Vincent and taunting him that his son is dead. The average New Yorkers seen on screen are barely less sociopathic, though; when Cassie’s is out handing out flyers in the street with her son’s face on it, men shout at her: “Get out of the way, lady!”
Though, as Eric continues to unspool, Morgan seems to want the story of Edgar’s disappearance to get out the way, too.
Ledroit – the series’s Dickensian elements extend to the detective’s aptronym, which immediately identifies him as on the right side of the law – increasingly focuses on his old missing person’s case, one that went cold, in part, because it involved less of a “perfect victim.”
This point could have been made more subtly, or at least less repeatedly. It’s one that ends up making what’s at the centre of the series seem a missing-person MacGuffin.
Why does Eric focus on Edgar, only to go on about how other stories would be more worthy of a miniseries? Morgan could have just written a different show, after all – and certainly, one with fewer scenes of Cumberbatch arguing with CGI Cumberbatch.
