“And what do we all say? Be good, be kind, be brave, be different. Good day sun, good day sunshine.” Songwriter Tim Minchin sets these words to a catchy little tune with a real swing in the alluring introduction to the limited series Eric (Netflix).
The series opens in a New York TV studio of the 1980s with a live broadcast in progress. Puppet characters with cute expressions bop around on screen while children in the studio audience sing along and wave balloons. But the whole world of the program, Good Day Sunshine, is about to be opened up with unwelcome new characters.
The news, delivered at the production meeting immediately after the show has gone to air, triggers a display of vindictive sarcasm from the show’s creator, Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch), who moments earlier was seen holding his puppet high against blue sky and leading the sunshine chorus with gusto. Vincent specialises in these switches of register, which he practises at home on his wife Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) and nine-year-old son Edgar (Ivan Howe).
The polarities are worked hard in the first episode, as Edgar, still holding his yellow balloon and retaining some of the exuberance of the show he’s just watched, waits around in the empty studio. When Vincent emerges from the meeting room in a filthy mood, he’s too preoccupied to connect. The two bottles of red wine he buys on the way home won’t last the evening.
Vincent walks fast and discharges screeds of fast talk, so absorbed in his own psychodrama that the people around him serve only as triggers for the next display of performative aggression. Cumberbatch is good at this — perhaps a bit too good, practised as he is at interpreting characters variously afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder (Sherlock), manic depression (Patrick Melrose) and deranged genius (Doctor Strange). But if he risks serving up a stir fry from his own repertoire, he’s rescued by the script.
Series creator Abi Morgan, probably best-known in Australia for her BBC series The Hour and The Split, steers events with a keen sense of the difference between generic ingredients and genuine dramatic development. Although Edgar’s disappearance in episode one is a predictable genre move, she avoids all the conventional suspense motifs of the lost-child plot by exploiting the flair for lateral thinking Edgar has inherited from his father. Vincent, thrown into a situation that confounds all his control strategies, must learn to follow his son’s lead. Literally, as it turns out: clues have been left that only he is able to read.
These apparently random signs are linked by the mysterious Eric, a life-size puppet with blue fur and a monster head, as portrayed in a series of drawings Edgar has left in his room. When Vincent really starts to pay attention to them, Eric becomes a presence in his own mind so tangible he starts to talk to it. It follows him as he goes in search of the child through an underworld of homeless encampments linked by the subways of New York City.
Cinematographer Benedict Spence and puppeteer Olly Taylor collaborate to braid fantasy and social realism in these scenes, supported by a soundtrack of eerie descending tones from composer Keefus Ciancia.
Cassie, meanwhile, involves herself in police detective Michael Ledroit’s investigation, which is yielding significant leads that also point towards the underworld. Here things get complicated, with a subplot involving the mother of a second missing boy, a black child whose disappearance has failed to attract the level of police attention being devoted to Edgar. This matters thematically, as does the multiracial culture of the dispossessed in which the three members of the family in their different ways become immersed.
Although Eric is described as a psychological thriller, Morgan swerves off-genre with a sustained commitment to social realities as she takes the central characters through a complex escape story. Vincent has to escape the legacy of bitterness from his economically privileged but emotionally devastating childhood; Cassie has to escape a hopeless marriage; but will Edgar, whose escape triggers the whole debacle, find his way back?
The answer to that (no spoilers) is bound up with the question of why Eric, the monster puppet, gets the title role. As a manifestation of the imaginative power Edgar has inherited, he holds together the frayed bond between father and son. Like a spirit guide, he appears from nowhere at decisive moments when Vincent, as if in some rite of passage to which he’s destined, must decide which path to follow through the heart of darkness.
It would be going too far to call this drama an allegory, but it does wave in that direction, and its theme of reclaimed childhood has a poetic resonance with the state of American culture when the nation’s future is in jeopardy. Although it has a British writer and star, this is a quintessentially American story, anchored in the wonderful heritage of postwar children’s television that gave us The Flintstones, Sesame Street, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Does the national psyche retain even the possibility of such innocent fun? In numerous ways Eric reminded me of Marielle Heller’s 2019 film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which stars Tom Hanks as the celebrated real-life children’s television host Fred Rogers. Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a puppet show very much in the style of the one created by Vincent, ran for 895 episodes between 1968 and 2016.
At the start of the film, Mister Rogers in his on-screen persona opens a succession of small doors in a board, each revealing the smiling face of one of the show’s familiar characters — until he gets to the last door, behind which is the unfamiliar and unsmiling face of a man called Lloyd Vogel, who bears the scars of a recent fight. The Neighborhood, like the Good Day Sunshine world, is about to be opened up to a new and disturbing presence.
Hard-bitten journalist Lloyd (Matthew Rhys) has reluctantly accepted a commission to profile the TV celebrity for a series on American heroes. But the tables are turned and he finds himself the subject of scrutiny. Like Vincent, he is carrying a burden of rage towards a father who failed as a parent and trying, against the odds, to be a father to his own son. Mister Rogers, who is in the business of celebrating innocence, is immediately drawn to someone who never experienced it.
“I don’t think you are broken,” he tells Lloyd as they face each other across a table in a diner. It comes across as a moment of quiet, benign, connection. The real Fred Rogers famously told an interviewer that he received some advice from his mother when distressing events were reported on the television news: “Look for the helpers. You’ll always find people who are helping.” Lloyd has found a helper.
For Vincent, trying to play the Mister Rogers in his own life by creating his puppet show, things look about as broken as they get. Until Eric, an avatar direct from the realms of childhood, comes to help. •
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