Eric

Netflix limited series, six episodes, from British playwright Abi Morgan. New York, 1985, back when the city was a health hazard with theaters. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Vincent Anderson, a brilliant, alcoholic, comprehensively unpleasant puppeteer behind a Sesame Street-style kids' show. His nine-year-old son walks to school one morning and doesn't arrive. Vincent's response to the disappearance is to spiral into the bottle and start building Eric — the seven-foot blue monster puppet from his son's notebook — while hallucinating that the monster is talking to him. Meanwhile McKinley Belcher III plays Michael Ledroit, the detective actually working the case, digging through a city that would rather he stopped.

Cumberbatch decomposing in real time is the sales pitch and it delivers — Vincent is vain, cruel, self-justifying, and the show never sands him down to make the grief palatable. The giant puppet gambit should be ridiculous; instead it works as a portrait of a man who can only process feelings through a character, because that's the only honest thing he's ever made. But the stealth engine of the show is Ledroit. Belcher plays a gay Black cop in 1985 New York carrying a dying partner at home and a corrupt department at work, and his investigation opens the show up from one missing kid into the city itself — the tunnels, the shelters, the people New York was actively choosing not to look for. The period texture is filthy and right: this is trash-strike, Hell's Kitchen, pre-cleanup New York, shot like it smells.

Morgan is juggling missing-child thriller, addiction drama, police corruption, city-hall rot, and a hallucinated monster, and six episodes isn't enough hands. Threads get resolved with a speed that borders on administrative — the back half ties bows the front half didn't earn. The Eric device also splits audiences cleanly: either the puppet lands for you as tragedy or it lands as a Cannes-lobby pitch that escaped containment, and the show can't help you across that line. And it wears its social conscience visibly; mostly the story carries it, but a few scenes stop to make sure you noticed.

For you if you want a prestige swing with an actual big performance in it, if you like your crime stories more interested in the city than the twist, if Mare of Easttown but stranger sounds right. Six episodes, one weekend, and it's a limited series — it ends, on purpose, no season two bait. You'll bounce if a man arguing with an imaginary blue monster while his son is missing is a tonal bridge you won't cross, or if you need your mysteries procedural-tight rather than metaphor-forward.

WORTH IT. Messy, overstuffed, and swinging at more than it can hit — but it's a real piece of writing with two genuinely great performances, and the misses are ambition misses, not laziness. It works. On the Lecture Test: a warning, not a citation — the themes occasionally get stated out loud when showing them would've done, but the characters stay characters, and Ledroit's storyline earns its weight honestly. One weekend, complete story, an actual ending. Netflix accidentally made a play. Watch it before they figure out what happened.