Review | ‘Eric’ saddles its puppet with too many strings

A show trying to fit that many themes into six short episodes often resorts to shortcuts. You need characters to stand in like chess pieces for various social trends: corrupt city officials, sinister bosses in waste management, dirty cops, sketchy nightclub denizens, long-suffering Black mothers, angelic unhoused artists and saintly gay men dying of AIDS. “Eric” has plenty of all of the above, and they’re exactly as flat as you’d expect. But — being ambitious, and conversant in its own clichés — the show mixes it up a little. Some corrupt city officials are (for example) surprisingly pleasant in interpersonal contexts; one is even prone to fits of conscience. One homeless woman is evil. Some of the gay pimps are not.

In fact, the series layers so much backstory onto certain characters that they lose their ability to represent anything at all. Take Vincent, the protagonist, who hallucinates the titular puppet. He isn’t your run-of-the-mill charismatic, playful but disappointing dad. He’s a Jim Henson-type genius helming a “Sesame Street”-style show, “Good Day Sunshine,” whose ratings are dipping — causing executives to demand a new puppet that can speak to children’s present-day concerns. (One suggestion: beatboxing.) Vincent is creative but erratic. He goes off-script mid-performance to roast city officials who happen to be present at a taping. He swears at his employees and undermines his partner. As a husband, he’s whiny, irascible and sneaky. As a dad, he can be fun but also competitive, thoughtless and narcissistic. He ignores some of his son’s efforts to connect — in particular, the boy’s concept for a scary-looking puppet named Eric.

Did I mention that Vincent is an alcoholic? Who may or may not suffer from some unspecified mental illness? Or that his unfeeling mother (who may or may not be mentally ill herself) kept him medicated throughout his childhood? Or that his father is a real estate magnate with virtually everyone in the city on his payroll?

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. The show’s peculiar but lovely world-building — which requires most of its characters to wander around in or under a single block in New York City — gains depth when its characters act a little irrationally. Hoffmann is shockingly effective as Vincent’s deeply flawed wife, Cassie, whose clarity of vision is weirdly undercut by the plot. So is Dan Fogler as Vincent’s less talented business partner, Lennie. Belcher, as the show’s restrained, intense, embattled detective in charge of missing people, consistently manages to upstage a life-size puppet every time they share a screen. That’s no easy task.

Neither is balancing an intimate story about parental guilt with a story about a city’s structural problems. None of these New York missing-child shows — which include Steven Soderbergh’s “Full Circle” and “The Changeling” (which follows grieving parents into a subterranean underworld of mole people who reside under the city’s subway system) — know what to do with the social wrongs they try to weave into their plots. For “Eric,” that uncertainty manifests as a list of narrative failures that it will almost compulsively replicate. It sometimes feels as if the show is, at least in this regard, its own psychologically abusive puppet. “I want to hold him in my arms,” the mother (Adepero Oduye) of the missing Black child who disappeared tells Detective Ledroit. “Even if all you can find is a skull. I will keep coming and coming and coming till you do something more than give me your sorries and driving me home. You are better than that.”

I thought of that indictment of how speech masks inaction when, later in the series, a protest on behalf of the city’s homeless — and demanding social change — is hijacked to produce a cathartic narrative about how private, personal change is more urgent. (The crowd goes wild.)

This show is filled with symbols it can’t populate with meaning.

The greatest and worst of these is the puppet. It’s telling, perhaps, that the show finds Vincent’s psychology interesting enough to warrant the show’s mascot: Eric, an enormous blue-and-white “walk-around” (based on Edgar’s idea) who voices Vincent’s tortured subconscious. It’s an enjoyable conceit, at least at first — one that allows the show to narrate Vincent’s descent into something like madness after Edgar’s disappearance. But the premise wears thin, because it never delivers anything of substance. Vincent’s conversations with Eric rarely register more than pretty standard self-loathing. Nothing particularly surprising or specific is revealed or unpacked. It makes one wonder why Vincent’s backstory needed to be quite so elaborate, or whether Eric was needed at all, because most of the plot functions that he serves are echoed by Vincent himself. Another conversation or two with his father, Robert (John Doman), or, indeed, with his son, may have sufficed. Both, in this version of “Eric,” remain ciphers.

Most disappointing of all, perhaps, is the way the series strains to make Eric capacious enough to function as a kind of psychic underbelly for both Vincent and New York. That’s a big ask, even for a big puppet, especially because he’s malevolent in the first instance and a voice for the unseen poor in the second. By the end, the pressure on Eric to do (or say) something transcendent feels pretty extreme. “Puppets get to say the things that we can’t,” one character says at one point. This viewer waited in vain for “Eric” to make good on that promise.

Eric (six episodes) is available May 30 on Netflix.