Eric

Award-winning series creator Abi Morgan (“The Split”) and director Lucy Forbes (“This Is Going to Hurt”) bring their knack for authentic, ambidextrous storytelling to the table. The period details couldn’t be better, and the final episode weaves the many elements together with effortless poignancy.

It might be set in a bygone New York City, but Morgan’s writing gives the series a distinctly British sensibility – slightly eccentric, dark in all the right moments and an ultimately hopeful tale of redemption.

Both Mr. Cumberbatch and Mr. Belcher have moments of enormous power, though much of it is front-loaded: The program gets increasingly silly during some of the later sequences, though the introduction of madness into a story allows it to get away with much more than if everyone were solidly sane. .... It is Cassie who maintains the core of grief at the center of "Eric." As a parent, I found her heartbreaking.

Eric packs a punch right where it hurts in the most thought-provoking of ways. It's brave and forthright in the themes it explores and hey, the inclusion of a puppet may stump many at first but it truly makes it a one-of-a-kind series.

It’s inventive, assured and far less weird than you expect.

Monsters real and imagined are confronted in an ambitious undertaking that successfully balances true-crime realism with child-like awe and wonder. More of this please, Netflix.

Eric doesn't have much we haven't seen before, but it's put together in a unique enough way to be compelling. The performances are strong, the visual identity is appealing, and the lack of humor in a show about a guy hallucinating a puppet is genuinely inspired.

Weird, dark but compulsively watchable.

Eric doesn’t sustain its momentum but it still boasts sufficient tension, heightened emotions, and some great performances. .... So while Eric isn’t perfect, its melancholy, sense of place, and general weirdness make it definitely worth your while.

There’s a lot to love in Eric, a show in which the whole cast and crew are dedicated to creating something unique. Sadly, all this effort is often hampered by how the series leading star, Cumberbatch, is stuck in a story loop that gets in the way of everything else.

In the end, Morgan and her collaborators (including director Lucy Forbes) are probably trying to squeeze too many concepts and tones into six episodes. But the ideas behind Eric — both the Netflix show and the cranky puppet within it — are intriguing enough, and most of the execution effective enough, that it’s always interesting, even when it’s messy.

The core mystery in “Eric” is revealed too early, but the penultimate episode is riveting enough to bring you back into the fold.

Eric at least makes for a fairly quick, if unevenly paced, watch. But it’s hard not to wonder what a different version of this show might have been—one that picked a lane and stuck with it, or that was more confident in what it was ultimately trying to achieve by telling this story in the first place. Because as it stands, it’s difficult to view this one as anything other than a disappointment.

Eric just lumbers around after Vincent like a malevolent, oversize pyjama case. Though far from a disaster (the first two episodes alone are better than most thrillers), I was expecting more.

An unfocused, inconsistently written, and wonderfully acted show whose ambition is admirable and originality rare in an increasingly formulaic crime genre, even if creator Abi Morgan (The Hour) never manages to reconcile its tonal dissonance. What holds it all together, albeit like a plastic bag tearing under the heft of its contents, is the parallel Morgan draws between a world overpopulated with bad dads and a patriarchy—one that, in the city, encompasses the police, real estate, and politics—that is rotting from the inside.

There’s a lot about Eric we didn’t love. But, boy, we loved Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the troubled, grieving father of a missing child. It’s so good it might actually paper over most of the show’s flaws.

The series is an ambitious swing, which is in itself a great thing – and if it misses, that makes it no less admirable an attempt.

The acting in the Netflix miniseries “Eric” is knock-down-drag-out good. There’s anger, madness, fear, loss, and grief all over the script, and there’s a set of performers, most notably Benedict Cumberbatch, who are seriously up to the task. Emotion is discharged. It’s all in service of an unwieldy, overstuffed 1980s-set story line that’s too ambitious for its own good, alas — but still, there’s a lot to admire in these six fast-paced episodes.

It is a mystery with a twist, where the twist is more interesting than the mystery. You don’t drink the cocktail for the garnish, but that doesn’t stop it adding some, much needed, zest.

Several times during Eric I asked myself, “If it wasn’t for Benedict Cumberbatch, would you carry on watching this?” The honest answer is no. Without him there would be far less reason to. Abi Morgan’s drama is well written, yes, but I didn’t find the story particularly compelling, hairy blue monster or not.

While there are a lot of individual aspects that are easy to admire, the series is a bit of a mess as a whole, a collection of ideas crammed into six hour-long episodes that Eric tries to wrap up too neatly by the final scene.

That’s a lot of specificity. Too much specificity, one might argue, for a show that wants to tie a fable about paternal regret to an indictment of a broken city. “Eric” is better at the former than the latter, artfully exposing and forgiving human foibles and celebrating the good things strangers can do for (and see within) each other.

“Eric” is painted in harsh and broad strokes, and the cynicism and ugliness is relentless without being particularly insightful.

A meandering treatise on the need to “do better” which fails, at every excruciating turn, to heed its own advice.

In every episode of “Eric,” there’s something that works, usually in the choices made by the ensemble, and one certainly can’t say that about every show on Netflix. To that end, fans of this one’s multi-talented lead should probably check it out. Everyone else might just want to watch “Sesame Street” instead.

“Eric” is filled with enough important issues — and one big hairy quirk — to make it seem like a series filled with fresh, serious ideas. But they’re really just window-dressing around another bad-dad saga that’s too distracted chasing a long shaggy tail.

Morgan ties her yarn in some pretty silly knots to complete the necessary redemption arcs in the finale, which delivers its first of several endings about half an hour into its 52-minute runtime. By then, it's a relief to know the ordeal is almost over.

The series ends up feeling imitative and unsatisfying. It’s flat-pack, prestige-ish television: easy to assemble from familiar narrative pieces, but fundamentally soulless.

“Eric” practically drips with Prestige TV trappings: a cast of great actors, a Very Serious Topic, and no doubt a primo slot coming soon on your Netflix recommendations page. It’s also all over the place as a six-episode series, a genuinely depressing slog through the corruption and general skeeviness of New York City in the 1980s.

Eric loses sight of the fundamentals. It stretches a feature film’s worth of plot over six languorous hours, draining them of suspense; Vincent’s spiral grows particularly tedious in its repetition.