TV review: Eric on Netflix is a hard watch — in more ways than one
Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent and Ivan Howe as Edgar in Eric, on Netflix.
It’s hard to watch (Netflix). Not because you feel terrible after an eight year old boy called Edgar vanishes on his way to school. It’s because you don’t feel terrible enough. And it’s all Benedict Cumberbatch’s fault.
He plays Edgar’s father Vincent, the creator of a kids' TV show in 1970s New York city, And he’s so good at playing this narcissistic man-child, that there isn’t room to notice much else going on in the show.
We first see Vincent shouting down his colleagues on the TV show, insisting it should say true to its founding principles, as if it was instead of what looks like a poor-man’s version of .
Then he picks on his son Edgar over dinner, drinks two bottles of wine and later has a flaming fight with his wife Cassie, so they don’t notice Edgar slipping out to school by himself, after which he vanishes.
Vincent reacts to the news of his child going missing by drinking at least two bottles of vodka and then waking up to a psychotic episode where a large blue monster tells him to get up out of bed and find Edgar.
It’s testament to Cumberbatch’s acting that we go along with this, but it’s definitely a different take on a missing child story.
It isn’t anything like , the 2014 drama where James Nesbitt plays the devastated father of a missing boy. There we feel sorry for Nesbitt’s character. Here we’re almost dumbstruck by Vincent’s self-centred reaction.
It doesn’t work for me. My wife loves , so I could be wrong – she’s hooked by Vincent’s awfulness, how it seems to gobble up our capacity for any empathy. I just think he’s a pain in the arse.
There isn’t a sliver of light to help us like him, unless you feel sorry for him because he think there’s a blue monster in his house.
The rest of the story is out of tune. The cop searching for Edgar is on a mission to take down a seedy nightclub, Lux, run by a gangster with dodgy past.
This feels like a different show – yes, we’re led to believe that Edgar disappearance is linked to the club, but the cop isn’t half as interesting a character as Vincent and you’re waiting to get back to Cumberbatch’s narcissist.
I get it. Vincent is having a prolonged mental breakdown, represented by the big blue monster he thinks is leading him around New York. That’s interesting for a while. But the show feels uneven.
I go from extreme revulsion around Vincent to a kind of a shrug when we join the cop on the hunt.
There isn’t enough to keep me watching.
