“Eric is about the way stories can save us,” contends screenwriter Abi Morgan (Shame, Suffragette) about her limited television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann. “At the heart of it, it’s about creativity. It’s about the brilliance and the toxicity that can sometimes go hand in hand with it. It’s also about dysfunction, not only dysfunction within a family, but also dysfunction that radiates out into a community, into a city, into institutions,” she expands.

The world of a creative who loses their mind felt “oddly familiar” to Morgan as she tells the story of a volatile puppeteer Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch) on a flailing children’s TV show called Good Day Sunshine, whose child Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) is kidnapped after allowing him to walk to school on his own on morning.

“I love Sesame Street. It’s such a beautiful educational slice of perfection that is fresh and alive for each new generation. It had an educational mission and I still believe that’s what Good Day Sunshine is doing.”

Morgan also relished the backstage “behind the flats, behind the curtain, behind the camera,”  scenes to illustrate Vincent’s anguish while the TV show wasn’t on air. She also looked to film like Broadcast News and Tootsie to guide her through these scenes.

The Inspiration – New York City, 1985

Eric is set in a highly specific time and place when New York City was in a state of relative decay. Abi Morgan was living there in 1986 working as a nanny. Eric was initially going to be set a few years earlier, but CCTV wasn’t in widespread use until around 1985, which featured heavily in the investigation to find Edgar.

Abi Morgan

“It was the Reagan era, and he was the first person who created a National Memorial Day for missing children.” He also introduced the phrase “Stranger Danger” into the American vernacular.

“The prism of the time is what I used to explode and expose through this investigation of how a family and a city falls apart. I had that experience of being with a very small person and walking through the streets, but also could see it from above. New York was a thrilling, exciting, busy place to be.”

New York feels like a city that both knows itself and can examine itself, but also is a character in its own story

The eighties carried a “huge sense of paranoia. Eric is about the disappearance of the centre of a city as well as the disappearance of a child,” continues Morgan.

“New York had that beauty and mythic quality. And because I feel like Eric is a fable, I wanted to set it in the biggest, most expansive, darkest forest I could find. It was both a playground and a kind of brilliant, terrifying place that I was exploring as an eighteen-year-old. It’s always been a very potent time for me and I was drawn back to that.”

Meet Vincent Anderson – (Father, Puppeteer, Lost Child)

Vincent is in a sad place. He’s lost his son, his beloved TV show is sputtering, and his wife Cassie (Gaby Hoffman) is on the verge of leaving him. He understands there’s an undefinable toxicity in his life. In Episode 6, he realizes that toxicity is him.

“His whole journey is to understand that the toxicity starts from within.” Hence the metaphor of the monster. “Monsters can’t only be one thing. They have to have another side to them. I like the duality of Vincent. I feel he is both monstrous, but he’s also the lost child. The real lost child that he’s searching for is Vincent himself. The monster is really what’s inside the costume and it’s the puppeteer who moves the puppet, not the puppet itself,” muses Morgan.

There’s a complicated architecture to creatives. They can be a warm-hearted genius, but also corrosive and self-destructive.

Vincent is both parent and child. He initially believes that the city has taken Edgar away from him. Eventually, he realizes that he has his own part to play in his son’s disappearance. His son is escaping from him.

Edgar Anderson (Ivan Morris Howe) Photo by Ludovic Robert/ Netflix

“His propulsion is very deep and he goes deep into himself rather than going forward.” Like, New York, Vincent knows himself. He knows he’s difficult, but just realizes how much.

“When he finds a map, he starts to find the clues to find Edgar. And in finding the clues, he starts to understand not only what physically has happened to his son, but more than anything, psychologically.”

Eric is the monster puppet created from his son’s drawings that Vincent uses to find Edgar. He’s convinced that broadcasting Eric will help bring him back.

“The construct of Eric is how we learn to understand Vincent. He colonizes his son’s creativity and makes Eric his own. He takes this character and you start to realize that it goes beyond the child and becomes a manifestation of himself. The playfulness that you see with Eric, the way he starts to reveal and expose himself, are a way for us to start to see behind the mask of Vincent.”

Vincent is toxic, repellent and challenging to empathize with. He’s also lost, broken and damaged; a theme that permeates through much of Morgan’s writing.

“There’s a key dialogue, when Vincent’s father asks him, ‘Why are you shaking?’ when they’re sitting in a car. And he replies, ‘Because you’re scary, Dad.‘”

“That’s the point he comes to realize that he’s embodied everything that he hated in his own childhood. Eric is about a man who has to refine the part of himself that he’s left behind. That’s what Edgar represents.”

Eric also encompasses different aspects of maleness – boyhood, manhood, husbandhood, friendship, and fatherhood. It’s about a generation of lost boys.

“When I first wanted to write about this, I wanted to write about male toxicity. I wanted to write about those monsters I’d seen in my own industry. But I guess, I was looking at legacy. I was looking at the things that we inherit and how we parent ourselves,” ponders Morgan. Parenting takes on a wider meaning in Eric where institutions are not adequately taking care of their citizens. In many cases, they are harming them.

“I’m looking for where the monsters are. They’re not under the bed. They’re not in the face of the homeless guy who you presume is going to do something bad to Edgar. They’re not in this boy abandoned in the street. The dark places are in city hall. The dark shadows are in the mind of Vincent. The dark shadows are in the minds of the capitalist office of the property developer Robert Anderson (John Doman), Vincent’s father.”

There are numerous female characters in Eric to balance the male ones.

Cassie Anderson (Gaby Hoffmann) Photo by Ludovic Robert/ Netflix

There’s Cassie (Vincent’s wife), Tina (Erika Soto), and Cecile (Adepero Oduye) who plays Marlon’s (Bence Orere) distraught mother whose son’s disappearance and death wasn’t properly investigated. Anne (Phoebe Nicholls ) who plays Vincent’s mother), is in denial about her son and wants to continue to medicate him.

All of these women are also observers of the men and cut to the truth.

The female characters are not perfect by any means. They cast a light on male toxicity, but are not without their own degree of toxicity. The cauldron of characters in Eric who are grappling with themselves and their environments generates a “dark, weird, brutal and tender tone,” according to Morgan.

Working With Actors

Each character in Eric is in different states of emotional pain. Some have resigned themselves to it, some are lashing out, and some are ignoring it as they get on with their lives. Eventually, they all reach a degree of healing no matter how subtle.

Benedict Cumberbatch brings “a brilliant and tender counterpoint and a window into understanding the kind of pain and depth of damage that a person can do to themselves,” mentions Morgan. When he boarded the project, three episodes were already written. His deep sense of Vincent’s character allowed him to work on drafts of the remaining episodes.

McKinley Belcher III who plays Michael Ledroit, fully inhabited his character as the closeted gay cop with an ageing partner dying from AIDS. Abi Morgan made some adjustments to the story based on his performance.

“The first scene that we shot with McKinley was the interrogation scene where he comes to the house to investigate Edgar’s disappearance. It was extraordinary to watch the way McKinley would hold his silence in the room with Gaby Hoffman and Benedict Cumberbatch,” adds the screenwriter.

“Cassie brings a quiet, potent despair, and intelligence, and that is a brilliant counterpoint to Vincent’s mania.”

Both the characters and the audience have been through the emotional wringer and are exhausted by the end of the series. There is a plateau which opens the possibility of hope. Edgar has returned home, less afraid. Vincent understands he must do better as a father.

“There’s a fairy tale ending for Vincent and Edgar. Edgar’s like the Hansel and Grettel character. He leaves a trail of crumbs which his father follows. Vincent has to cut the ties with his own father to become a better father to Edgar. He’s saying goodbye to the monster in his life.“