Review of the series Eric with Benedict Cumberbatch

Benedict Cumberbatch, perhaps, played his second best role on television after the Sherlock series, namely the role of the puppeteer Vincent, who has a shitty sarcastic cynical misanthropic character and loses his nine-year-old son Edgar in the psychological crime-detective miniseries Eric. Yes, Eric, as you can see, is neither a father’s nor a son’s name. It’s the name of a big hairy doll, a blue monster with seemingly menacing fangs, with whom the not-quite-conscious hero talks sometimes in his mind and sometimes out loud. So, yes, Erica can be called an adult, dark, realistic, unsentimental variation on the same theme as the recent children’s Imaginary Friends with Ryan Reynolds.

The story is set in New York City in 1985. The protagonist Vincent has a wife, a son, a modest apartment, a red cat, and a job he hates in a metropolis he hates. He doesn’t have a car and takes the subway because he refused to accept his wealthy and influential father’s riches on principle. A local developer and “philanthropist” type who actually cleans the streets of vagrants and marginalized people and stuffs the city with luxury housing for the rich, and of course is ashamed and despises his schizoid son. He adores Tolstoy’s quotes and to some extent professes Tolstoyism in the sense that he also denies the supremacy of money and renounces wealth and luxury, but he violates Tolstoy’s commandments completely and is not just angry at people around him, but basically cannot stand anyone and does not wait for a special occasion to offend them.

Vincent seems to be going through a midlife crisis, global frustration, and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He’s furious at work because he thinks he’s the only genius behind a puppet show (a Muppet-like children’s TV program) and that all his colleagues are talentless idiots. He is angry about the dirty, rotten, corrupt city and the fact that the city government is funding his TV show, so the mayor should be kissed in the ass.

He goes crazy at home, and the constant domestic quarrels have become a chronic diagnosis of his extremely sick (perhaps incurable) marriage. Eventually, he takes it out on his son… One day, focusing on another fight with his wife, he lets the boy go to school alone, and he disappears

At first, you might think that Eric is a sour conversational drama where Cumberbatch’s hero (or antihero), suffering from guilt and going crazy from grief, begins to have conversations with an imaginary doll as therapy, to reflect through discussions with a hallucination, and the whole plot is precariously based on these blah, blah, blah sessions. In reality, it’s not like that at all. There is a minimum of schizophrenic chatter with a non-existent plush monster. But there are a lot of meanings, subtexts, metaphors behind this seemingly stupid and naive image. And the brutal way in which the series’ authors managed to add a “childish blue touch” to this dark, hard story (in one scene, Vincent snorts cocaine in tandem with an imaginary friend or foe, which may remind one of the obscene comedy “The Third Man” about the bad bear Ted, only here there is little humor and it is much blacker) makes “Eric” even darker and more noir.

The most elementary explanation of the allegory is that the doll is Vincent’s alter ego, the monstrous side of his bipolar personality. The puppeteer (puppeteer, ventriloquist) is an ideal image on the borderline between a storyteller and a maniac, a serial pedophile and a magician.

However, the authors of the series do not limit themselves to one interpretation and dig deeper. The shaggy-haired monster Eric is both a saving escapism for a fugitive from reality of any age, whether nine or forty; and a visualization of inner demons. Erik is Vincent, Edgar, and Vincent’s father, i.e. a doppelganger, an ambiguous (kind and fierce at the same time) father for a frightened and lost son; and an incomprehensible son hidden in a shell for an alienated father.

Eric is both the monster that lives under the bed in the children’s room and the fucking devil that lives inside us. Eric is the entire city of New York (conditional New York, conditional Gotham) and every single inhabitant of it; an ugly, annoying city with garbage dumps and sewers, a corrupt rotten system and deals all along the hierarchy; drug addicts selling children for a dose, perverts and gluttonous fat cats; demoralized morality, homophobia, racism and sunny lies on television A city of puppets and puppeteers. But at the same time, Eric is a ghostly voice of clumsy hope that lurks behind even when all seems lost.