Eric review: Benedict Cumberbatch and a seven-foot monster make a riveting team in new Netflix mystery

She’s not afraid to come up with a concept that pushes things to the very edge of absurdity, yet somehow works. To wit, 2015’s River, a police procedural starring Stellan Skarsgard as a detective who’s haunted by visions of his murdered colleague (Nicola Walker) as he tries to find her killer.

Morgan’s miniseries Eric (Netflix, all episodes available from Thursday, May 30) is by a long, long stretch her boldest work yet. Even more so than River, it has the potential to fall off the cliff, but somehow never does.

Set in the scuzzy, pre-gentrified melting pot that was New York in the 1980s, and painting a picture of the city every bit as evocative of a hell on earth as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in the previous decade, Eric marks the return to television of Benedict Cumberbatch, and he’s in electrifying form.

Eric | Official Trailer

Cumberbatch showed he could do mainstream, crowd-pleasing fare as well as anyone as Dr Strange in the Marvel blockbusters, but he’s usually at his best when he’s playing tortured, volatile characters, whether it’s the taciturn, sexually repressed cowboy in The Power of the Dog, or the substance abuser haunted by horrific childhood trauma in Patrick Melrose.

We can add another one to Cumberbatch’s impressive gallery: Vincent Anderson, a puppeteer and the creator of a Sesame Street-style children’s TV show called Good Day Sunshine, which is suffering a worrying dip in the ratings.

The characters controlled by Vincent and his long-suffering team may be cuddly and lovable, but Vincent himself is extremely hard to like. He’s vile to his colleagues, borderline abusive to his wife Cassie (Gaby Hoffman), especially when he’s drunk, which is a lot of the time, and a neglectful father to their nine-year-old son Edgar (a refreshingly natural performance by young Ivan Morris Howe).

The sensitive Edgar continually tries to show his father a character he’s come up with: a benevolent blue monster called Eric, who he thinks would be perfect for Good Day Sunshine.

But Vincent is too self-absorbed, not to mention sloshed, much of the time to take any notice.

Even when Edgar succeeds in catching his father’s attention for a few minutes at the dinner table, Vincent — three sheets to the wind, of course — responds by mocking and humiliating the kid, and inevitably regrets it later.

‘He’s usually at his best when he’s playing tortured, volatile characters’

He has far more to regret when, the morning after another blazing row with Cassie, he selfishly lets Edgar walk to school by himself and the boy disappears. Vincent’s mind begins to unravel.

Drinking even more heavily than usual, he gets the idea into his head that if he can turn Eric into an actual puppet and put him on the TV show, Edgar might get to see it and this would somehow magically persuade him to return home.

Before long, a seven-foot Eric (brilliantly voiced by Cumberbatch) is materialising to Vincent. As the drama progresses, we learn that Vincent has had mental health issues in the past. Sitting on a subway train and talking to someone who isn’t there would be nothing new for him.

Eric would work fine as a missing-child mystery and a police procedural, but Morgan’s script covers much more: homelessness, the AIDS crisis, homophobia, the institutional racism of the police and the media.

In one of several sub-plots, a black boy the same age as Edgar is also missing, yet the case attracts far less attention than the disappearance of a well-off white couple’s son.

Ironically, the investigating detective, Michael Ledroit (Ozark’s McKinley Belcher III), is a black closeted gay man — not the kind of person to feel at ease in the sweaty, macho world of the NYPD in the 1980s — with an older partner who’s dying of AIDS.

If Eric has a drawback, it’s that Cumberbatch’s performance (which will surely bring him another Emmy nomination, at the very least) is so intense, so compelling, it sometimes threatens to overpower the drama’s many other merits.

He really is one of his generation’s greatest.