'Eric' shows what happens when a puppeteer loses control

The new Netflix mini series Eric asks one of the universal questions: What if Jim Henson was an emotionally abusive drunk, his son disappeared in mid-eighties New York, the investigation involved crooked cops and a queer nightclub and an underground homeless camp, and Henson started having hallucinatory conversations with his younger Muppet as a way to deal with all of this?

You know, that old chestnut.

Technically, Benedict Cumberbatch is not plays Henson, but an imaginary peer of the late, great puppeteer: Vincent Anderson, creator and head puppeteer of a beloved, long-running children's show on public television called Good morning sunshine. In one episode, Vincent and his producer Lennie (Dan Fogler) even discuss a previous meeting with Henson, which is perhaps Eric Creator Abi Morgan's way of making sure no one mistakes the man writing for the genuine article.

However, Eric all but require us to see them through a Kermit the Frog-shaped lens. Good morning sunshinelike Sesame Street (where Henson first introduced Kermit, Ernie and so many other iconic Muppets) in its Seventies heyday, it acts as a bright mirror of the Big Apple during its gloomier and worm-filled era, and has a similar flower-child ethos. (His motto, recited by the adoring children at the end of each episode: “Be good, be brave, be kind, be different.”)

when Eric begins, however, both the series and its creator have seen better days. Public television bosses, eager to stay in the limelight, pressure Vincent and Lenny to add a boombox character. Vincent's marriage to Cassie (Gaby Hoffmann) has degenerated into incessant fighting. And while their son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) loves Vincent's work enough to want to create a new puppet — the titular Eric, a gruff but ultimately kind giant monster, less like the Sweetums than The Muppet Show rather than a live-action Sully from MONSTERS INC. — He has become understandably wary of his father's erratic behavior. After witnessing another vicious fight between his parents one morning, Edgar tries to make the short walk to his elementary school alone and gets lost somewhere in between. Given Vincent's celebrity—as well as the influence of his real estate mogul father, Robert (John Doman from The wire) — Missing-person detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III) is ordered to throw every NYPD source on the case, even if it means Vincent himself turns out to be responsible for what happened to Edgar. And as his life falls apart at the seams, Vincent begins to see a three-dimensional Eric, screaming at him wherever he goes.

Abi Morgan's writing career in the UK tends to shift between stage dramas (the 2005 BAFTA-winning Sexual traffic) and historically (Timefor a 1950s BBC news program starring Ben Whishaw, Dominic West and Romola Garai). This is a period piece, set in the same era as her screenplay for the Margaret Thatcher biopic The iron lady, but this time across the lake. It's a huge swing, not only in the fact that it takes place so far from her home, but in trying to cover so much socio-economic territory through Ledroit's research and in trying to combine Richard Price-style sprawling urban fiction with the literal of Eric's imagination to become Vincent's. fellow traveler

In the end, Morgan and her collaborators (including director Lucy Forbes) are probably trying to cram too much meaning and tone into six episodes. But the ideas behind Eric — both the Netflix show and the frantic marionette within it — are intriguing enough, and most of the execution is effective enough that it's always interesting, even when it's messy.

Manhattan in the seventies and eighties, before Rudy Giuliani's election as mayor and subsequent use of draconian police tactics to clean up the city, can be difficult to dramatize without descending into caricature. HBO's The Deuce he pulled it. His New York Eric it feels a little too much like a dark, larger vision – or, at least, like a tourist's view – to be as effective as it wants to be in contrasting its reality with the sequences where Vincent and Eric fight, or do lines of cocaine together at the nearby Lux nightclub.

Lux also becomes the focus of Ledroit's search for Edgar, even though it's clear that he has a long history with the club's owner, Gator (Wade Allain-Marcus) that makes it hard to be objective about it. The story's tentacles extend into the club, the AIDS crisis for gay men during this time, pre-Giuliani efforts to clean up the streets by any means necessary, and more, in ways that deepen the story and interfere with her. The search for the missing child is so urgent and emotional that it overwhelms everything else in the first few chapters, making for largely unrelated subplots – including one about behind-the-scenes political wrangling at Good morning sunshine — feel like a distraction. As if acknowledging this, Morgan tells the audience a lot about what happened to Edgar midway through the six-episode season. This allows the other stories to feel more vital, but it sucks a lot of suspense out of the main plot.

Yet even with all that, the idea is so thrillingly weird, and Cumberbatch and Hoffman are so incredibly raw as these damaged, embattled, terrified parents, that Eric it works even when it seems to have lost its thread. And his world Good morning sunshine it ultimately manages to anchor everything else. When Cassie asks Lennie why he, Vincent, and so many others are obsessed with puppets, Lennie suggests, “They can say things we can't.”

Morgan is of course far from the first person to look at the world created by Jim Henson and see more potential for adults. The Tony-winning musical Avenue Q he made the gay subtext between Bert and Ernie text about feuding roommates Rod and Nicky and had the Cookie Monster analog sing a song called “The Internet Is For Porn.” Homicide detective Melissa McCarthy teamed up with a puppet private detective in 2018 The Happytime Murders. Modern TV shows like Greg the bunny, Wonder Showzen, Banterand others have used Muppet-like characters for different purposes for adults.

As such, Henson himself tried early and often to avoid being defined solely as a children's performer. For his first season Saturday night live, created a team of puppets for a recurring sketch set in a fantasy world called Gorch. One of the first pilot episodes for what happened The Muppet Show it was subtitled Sex and violence. And once he'd successfully brought Kermit, Fozzie and Miss Piggy to the big screen, Henson used his Hollywood blank check to make grittier, less kid-friendly fantasy films. The Dark Crystal and Maze.

Henson's efforts to avoid typography were not much appreciated in his lifetime. The SNL staff hated writing Gortz's sketches, the studio audience didn't laugh at them, and they flopped mid-season. Its final iteration The Muppet Show it was much more family-oriented. And while Dark Crystal and Maze have both become cult classics, received mixed reviews at this time from critics and audiences.

But given his willingness to take puppetry to strange grown-up places, and given that Morgan clearly separates Vincent from the man who inspired it, I can't help but think that the real Jim Henson might have really enjoyed Eric.

All eight episodes of it Eric start streaming May 30 on Netflix. I've seen all eight.