Eric is not the only monster in this grim thriller

ERIC is not the show I thought it would be. All I knew before watching was that it was a six-part thriller about Edgar, a missing nine-year-old boy, and his father Vincent, a puppeteer played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is followed around by a massive blue and white furry monster called Eric.

- Eric

“The real monsters aren’t under your bed”, screamed the trailer. Not my kind of show, I thought. Too surreal. But oddly, Eric the monster is quite a small part of the overall tale. The monsters which really rule are the ones in the shadows, in your head, in the grim underbelly of Eighties New York. The monster that I worried would dominate the narrative, making it just a little too weird, only appears at the end of the first episode, and very little in the second — which at first makes its presence even more incongruous.

Instead it is superseded by the many threads of storyline dangling around the first few episodes, police corruption to the city’s homeless problem to affairs to alcoholism to the Aids crisis… it goes on. At first, it feels like too many.