Netflix 'Eric' series with Benedict Cumberbatch, Gaby Hoffmann and McKinley Belcher III shows that 'creativity saves you'

Set around the search for a missing nine-year-old boy, Benedict Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann lead the new thriller limited series Eric on Netflix. The show, created by Abi Morgan and directed by Lucy Forbes, is likely one of the most unique approaches you've seen to the genre.

Set in 1980s New York, Vincent (Cumberbatch) is the creator and lead puppeteer for a show called "Good Day Sunshine," a program similar to Sesame Street. Vincent has a lot of toxic traits and aggression, stemming from trauma from a young age. There's significant male toxicity, something he saw his father display, he's an abusive alcoholic who is frequently at odds with his coworkers, his wife Cassie (Hoffman) and even his son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe).

One morning, while Vincent and Cassie are having a fight at home, Edgar leaves their apartment. While his parents thought he was going to school, he never got there, and they frantically try to find their son.

Detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), one of the only Black officers in the NYPD, takes on the case. Unbeknownst to many, he lives with his boyfriend, who is dying of AIDS.

Ledroit believes that Edgar's disappearance is linked to a nightclub called The Lux. But his boss, played by David Denman, isn't interested in hearing any theories connected to operations at the club.

When Vincent finds Edgar's drawings, specifically a character named Eric, Vincent thinks the best way to get his son home is to put Eric on "Good Day Sunshine." But Vincent starts hallucinating and seeing Eric, a seven-foot-tall fuzzy puppet, who becomes his sort of partner to find Edgar.

'Creativity saves you'

While there is certainly a lot of trauma explored in Eric, Morgan also crafted the story with a critical element of playfulness.

"At the heart I think the message is that creativity saves you," Morgan told Yahoo Canada. "The message is that if one can create one's own monster and face it full on, and take it on its journey and make it part of our narrative, then, in a way, it's the secret to success."

"As toxic as Vincent is, he comes to face his own toxicity by creating and expressing. He's a very expressive person, but he comes to realize how much that's alienating people around him. I was very drawn to that on a practical level in his character, but also in a literal level, in the creation of the puppets."

Cumberbatch shared in a separate interview that Eric is an "odyssey" of a man understanding "two lost children," Vincent as a child and how's he's "lost sight" of his own son.

"The connections you build within that are vital to the survival of both characters, really," he said. "He's created this entire world, which is under threat from a kind of corporate culture, wanting to make ['Good Day Sunshine'] broader in its appeal for ratings."

"But for him it's not just that, it's an assault on his identity, because he's created this thing of inclusive, diverse, humorous, odd, imperfect, unified beauty out of what in his childhood was an incredibly lonely experience of loveless neglect, and medicated care for a mental health crisis."

The actor also stressed that the drawing, creativity and playfulness shown in Eric isn't just a "nice thing" to have, but the vital part of the series.

"I think his toxicities, it's symptomatic of the causality behind it," Cumberbatch said. "It's not innate in any of us."

"It's a discovery of what made him who he is and how he, I guess on his heroic journey, shifts away from that, ... with this alter ego, this psychotic split in the form of Eric, this co-creation of his son, and his."

For Morgan, one of the most exciting things to observe on set was the actors interacting with the puppets.

"When Eric first came on set, he was so magical, we all became like children again," Morgan said.

"So inherently, if you put a puppet in a scene, as dark as it can be, and he is often there in the darkest moments, there is always a kind of nod to something, which is asking an audience to play a bit of a game with you."

'He must compartmentalize his life to maintain a degree of safety'

Aside from Vincent, McKinley Belcher III provides a particularly impactful performance, navigating the Ledroit that the character presents to the world. Belcher a real highlight in Eric.

"That navigating the public and private self was some of the things that made playing Ledroit really delicious," he said. "Because some of it is performance, where he must compartmentalize his life to maintain a degree of safety, and his job would be in jeopardy, in some ways, if he were to be out, loud and open. We even see over the course of the show, some ways in which it is weaponized and leveraged against him."

"But on a personal note, there's part of me as McKinley that I understand what it feels like to have a part of yourself that you're either not ready to share with other people, or that you feel like you can't share with other people. Either for safety, either because you don't understand it fully, or because it'll affect how you're perceived in a way that might be detrimental, in some way. And I think that weighs around the neck like a weight and I think it's a weight that [Ledroit] carries around with him."

'Sometimes we do the strangest things at the darkest times'

Alongside the journeys of Vincent and Ledroit, we're also getting this exploration of a woman, a mother, trying to "find herself," as Morgan described.

"A woman trying to find her identity, separate from her role as a mother and certainly as Vincent's much harangued partner and wife," Morgan said about the character Cassie.

That's best shown in the small moments of relief, like one scene in Episode 3 when Cassie is at home, alone, and starts dancing to Joan Armatrading's "Love and Affection."

"It was something that we sort of conceived of in rehearsal and then there was a day that Lucy said, 'Remember how we had that idea? We have time to do it now. Do you want to do it now?'" Hoffmann recalled. "I had brought up Joan Armatrading in pre-production as somebody I was listening to and I was thinking about Cassie, and so Lucy said, 'What about a Joan Armatrading song?' And she picked that one."

"I had this beautiful time dancing to it and then three nights later, ... we find out at dinner that Clarke Peters, who plays [Cassie and Vincent's neighbour] George, is the male voice singing on that song, in the original recording. So there was something sort of fated and beautiful about it. Playing that moment was a real release for me as an actress, just as it was for Cassie."

Morgan was on set when that scene was shot and also saw it as an "upending of tropes."

"We know what a grieving mother looks like. We know what a terrified mother looks like. But I imagined myself in that situation, I wondered if I would take myself to the very extreme places in myself, and that might mean I have to do things to kind of let go and release. And dancing felt like a very obvious and understandable, and yet contrary, thing to do," Morgan said.

"I think that sort of nods to the playfulness, that sometimes we do the strangest things at the darkest times."