Eric (2024)

from Indiewire: https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/shows/eric-review-benedict-cumberbatch-netflix-series-1235009913/

Eric

BY BEN TRAVERS
MAY 30, 2024 9:00 AM


No matter how you dress them up, some characters just aren’t compelling enough to carry a story. They can be daring and desperate, kind and cultured, tattooed and full of ticks — heck, they can even be an alien from another planet, but if there’s no depth to their emotional spectrum, no hook to their charming personality, no mystery to their misery that merits its extended unraveling, well, then they’re just an empty suit — even if that suit is a horned, fanged, six-foot-tall puppet monster.

Such a descriptor may seem harsh for the star of “Eric,” a dad by the name of Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch), who, on paper, seems like a perfectly suitable lead for a six-episode series. First and foremost, Vincent is the co-creator of a hit “Sesame Street”-like TV show titled “Hello Sunshine.” His staged neighborhood of colorful puppets is as beloved as Vincent himself is reviled. You see, Vincent isn’t a very nice person. He’s the cardboard cut-out of a tortured artist (perhaps his name is a nod to Vincent van Gogh?), angering his co-workers with nonstop complaints about everything from network notes to sloppy puppet construction, and driving loved ones away with his controlling nature, exhausting know-it-all-ness, and excessive drinking.


“Everyone thinks about changing the world and no one thinks about changing themselves,” Vincent says, mid-rant, waiting not-so-patiently for his 9-year-old son, Edgar (Ivan Howe), to identify his statement as a Tolstoy quote. Fun dad, huh? Not so much. But bad dads can make for good characters — there’s another show about a wayward father who also happens to be a famous puppeteer that’s actually worth watching — and perhaps Vincent could have been one, too, if only his central problem wasn’t obvious from the second he obliviously quoted one of Russia’s great writers. Vincent is so busy trying to perfect his kids’ show that he doesn’t realize his awful disposition is alienating his own child — until it’s too late.

Somewhere along his morning walk to school, Edgar disappears. The community goes on high alert. And Vincent flies into action. …kind of. “Eric” is predominantly about the search for Edgar, tracked via two parallel plots: a missing persons detective (played with a stirring mix of anger and poise by McKinley Belcher III) leading the NYPD’s official investigation, and Vincent, off on his own, charging ahead with his own misguided crusade. Because his whole world revolves around the fake sun painted above his pretend TV playground, Vincent can only process what’s happening to his family by convincing himself to build Edgar’s idea for a new puppet named Eric. If he can just get the giant, grumbling creature on TV, Vincent thinks his son will see him and find his way home.

As batshit banana-brained as that sounds, watching Vincent stumble around talking to a yeti-like imaginary monster gets old fast — partly because it’s always unclear whether the plan is actually supposed to work, or if everyone just thinks they’re better off humoring a sad dad who’s been pushed to the brink of sanity. (It stops and starts, its urgency waxing and waning with Vincent’s deteriorating mental state, which makes it difficult to determine if we’re watching a madmen in a death spiral or if we’re really meant to believe he’s on the right track.) But the other, arguably more pressing issue is that the cop’s grim investigation doesn’t gel with Vincent’s fantasy-land adventure. While Vincent is downing vodka all morning and dancing with a furry blue Sully substitute all night, Detective Ledroit (Belcher) is hunting down pedophile rings and staking out nightclub restrooms where sexually insecure men threaten to cut off each other’s balls.McKinley Belcher III in ‘Eric’Courtesy of Ludovic Robert / Netflix

The whiplash between the two stories is slightly stabilized by their shared setting: a beautifully gritty vision of 1980s Manhattan courtesy of production designer Alex Holmes. Rarely has New York City felt as full and filthy [complimentary] as it does here, and director Lucy Forbes uses the hustle and bustle to further emphasize that everyone feels like a suspect when you’re searching for a needle in a giant, grimy haystack. With transparent cliffhangers ending most episodes, a fluid pace, and the human compulsion to find out what happened, the episodes fly by, but I wouldn’t say they’re easy to watch. That whiplash never fully fades, and the pitch-black underworld dominating half the show creates a foul flavor that lingers after the credits roll / Netflix autoplays an ad for “Baby Reindeer.”

Plus, as soon as you recognize the embarrassingly flat arc Vincent is barely able to crest, there’s simply no saving “Eric.” For Cumber-enthusiasts, it barely functions as a showcase for its very capable star, since this isn’t the first time we’ve watched the two-time Oscar nominee depict a toxic white man, or a profound windbag, or a rich so-and-so who descends into a drunken and drugged stupor, and these repetitive character traits do little to draw interest toward his tiresome new character.

Aside from Vincent’s self-evident flaws, he also suffers in comparison. Det. Michael Ledroit doesn’t exactly break the mold. We’ve seen cops process their personal grief by throwing themselves into the darkest corners of their work time and time again. But in addition to Belcher’s tough-and-tender turn, his storyline expands beyond his dying boyfriend at home, beyond the search for Edgar among Manhattan’s ugliest denizens, into an affecting (albeit extremely unpleasant) concurrent quest. Marlon Rochelle, a 14-year-old Black boy, has been missing for much longer than Edgar. He’s been gone for enough time his mother has given up hope of finding him alive, but remains resolute in her demands for justice. She calls Ledroit’s office every other day. She asks the questions no one else will ask. Why is all this attention going to another kid? Where’s her son’s nightly news stories? How come the NYPD is trying to brush her and her boy under the rug?

The answers matter less than how Ledroit responds to the questions. As a closeted gay man in a station filled with macho white guys dropping racial slurs and homophobic retorts on the regular, the detective doesn’t exactly feel welcome at work. He doesn’t really feel welcomed anywhere, except with his partner, and that sole safe space comes with a ticking clock. But he’s very good at his job — good enough to know when suspects aren’t telling the full truth, good enough to notice clues overlooked by others, and good enough to spot curious overlaps between Marlon and Edgar’s circumstances. That he’ll have to put his own job, his own life, on the line to help these boys almost goes without saying, but showrunner Abi Morgan makes sure you feel the weight of the forces he’s up against, which feel especially hefty compared to the fluffy furball Vincent’s dragging around.

It’s a bit too simplistic to say “Eric” is half of a good show and half of a bad one. Questionable decisions abound, whether it’s what facts are shared to stretch out the mystery or how the series embodies some of the very problems to which it draws attention. (Maybe don’t spend the majority of your story on the white kid and his basic family while a rightly rage-filled Black mother sits in silence — except, of course, when the show wants to chastise the cops for racial discrimination?) “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.

from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2024/04/27/baby-reindeer-review-a-devastating-examination-of-trauma-and-abuse/?sh=659f967268c0

Baby Reindeer

by Erik Kain
Apr 27, 2024,07:00am EDT

Baby Reindeer is one of the best Netflix Originals I’ve ever seen, though it ended up being quite a lot darker and more disturbing than I expected. In its trailers and marketing, Richard Gadd’s adaptation of his one-man play (based on a true story) appears to mostly be about his character’s encounter with a stalker. I knew it was going to be dark, but at first blush it looked more like a dark comedy than anything.

That is not the case. Still, what I did get—while tough to watch and unexpected—was brilliant. This is a show I highly recommend, though before you do know that it includes graphic depictions of sexual assault and deals with challenging mental health issues, trauma and abuse. It deals with these issues with nuance and care, and it handles its challenging themes without being preachy, which I appreciate. But it’s not an easy watch.

Spoilers follow.

Gadd plays Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian working at a pub in Camden. He meets a woman named Martha (Jessica Gunning) who seems a bit down on her luck, and so he does what any decent human being would do and shows her a small act of kindness by giving her her drink (a Diet Coke) for free. Soon, she’s spending every day at the pub, talking his ear off all shift long, making up all sorts of obvious fantasies about her busy, glamorous life. It quickly becomes apparent that she has an obsession with him, and it’s not long after that the emails begin. Hundreds a day, filled with typos and misspelled words, mostly about nothing but increasingly flirtatious.

He looks her up online and realizes she’s been convicted and imprisoned in the past for stalking. But Donny is frustratingly incapable of setting healthy boundaries, and things get out of hand. I wrote about the first half of the show already, and how his character stressed me out so much. He ends up ruining the one healthy romantic relationship he manages to build—with a trans woman named Teri (Nava Mau)—because of all the baggage he’s lugging around, though we learn that his issues go much deeper than Martha.

In the second half of the show, we discover a lot more about what motivates Donny—and what’s holding him back. In the fourth episode (out of seven) the show takes a very dark, very difficult turn. We flashback about five years to when Dunn was just getting started as a comic, trying—and failing rather badly—to get his comedy routine going in Edinburgh. There, he meets a writer named Darrien (Tom Goodman-Hill) and the two hit it off. Darrien helps him turn around his comedy show almost overnight. Donny gets that first taste of what fame might be like, and he’s addicted.

When Dunn moves to London, he and Darrien reconnect and soon they’re spending an inordinate amount of time together. Darrien promises to help Donny get his writing career off the ground. And he feeds him massive amounts of drugs in the process, something Donny goes along with because he’s trying to impress his new mentor. When Darrien gives him a shot of GHB—a common date rape drug—it becomes all too apparent what’s happening. He’s being groomed, lied to and put in a terribly vulnerable position. When all of this leads to repeated sexual assault, we hope that Donny will leave. He does not. He stays in this horrifying situation, still clinging to the idea that Darrien meant what he said about him having talent, that this really is still his best shot at fame.

When he returns to his girlfriend, Keeley (Shalom Brune-Franklin) he’s incapable of having sex. She doesn’t understand why. They ultimately break up. Years later, Donny meets Martha and while she becomes his stalker, he becomes almost equally obsessed with her. It isn’t until things really hit rock bottom that he finally reports her to the police.

In the final episodes, Donny finally melts down, revealing everything that’s happened to him while performing at a stand-up comedy finals. It’s heartbreaking, and Gadd’s performance had me in tears. (I spent a lot of time crying in the second half of the show). The monologue goes viral on YouTube, and Donny finally gets his big break, landing sold-out gigs and once again tasting that sweet, sweet adoration and fame—but the nightmare continues.

When Martha begins stalking his parents, she threatens to tell them about his online confession, so he visits them first and tells them everything. It’s yet another heartbreaking scene, not because his parents reject him, but because his father reveals that he, too, was sexually assaulted when he was just a boy. Donny tells them that he worried they’d think of him as less than a man, and his dad replies “Would you think of me as less of a man?” before revealing that he was abused by a priest.

In the end, Martha is convicted of stalking and harassment against Donny and his parents after she leaves a threatening voicemail. There is little satisfaction at her sentencing hearing, as she weeps and admits to everything. She’s left countless voicemails, and after she goes to jail, Donny becomes obsessed with listening to them, trying to make sense of them. His friends and family worry about his mental state.

In the very final scene, he’s just come from visiting Darrien, his rapist. Deeply shaken—the confrontation did not go how he thought it would—he finds himself in a bar.

Sitting there alone, he listens to Martha’s voicemails. One he’s never heard comes on and stops him in his tracks. She finally reveals why she’s given him the nickname, “Baby Reindeer.” It’s because as a young girl, she had a little stuffed reindeer and it was the only good thing in her entire life, the thing she clung to when her parents fought and took comfort in during long years of neglect. And Donny, she says, reminded her of that reindeer right down to its wee bum.

It’s a moment of terrible revelation for Donny, whose guilt over Martha’s fate comes crashing down around him. When the bartender asks him for his drink order, he realizes he didn’t bring his wallet. Sitting there in his misery, dejected and alone, the bartender tells him the drink is on him. The same exact act of kindness Donny showed Martha at the very beginning of the series.

The credits roll.

This is one of the most perfect endings of a limited TV series I can recall, not because we’re meant to think that Donny will now become this dude’s stalker, but because of how it illustrates the way cycles of abuse can perpetrate, and how almost every abuser has at one time likely been a victim first. Baby Reindeer does such a phenomenal, gut-wrenching job at examining how trauma and abuse can make people act in ways that—to the outside observer—make no sense. Donny’s inaction with Martha seems inexplicable, until we realize that so much of what he does is driven by confusion and self-hatred. “The only thing I loved more than [Teri],” he says during his impromptu monologue, “Was hating myself. And I loved her so very, very much.”

He finally realizes that so much of Martha’s mental health stems from her own past traumas and that his behaviors and hers mirror one another. Sitting there in the same seat she was in, his empathy for his once-stalker finally makes sense.

It’s been a long time since a TV show has left me this emotionally shaken in the end. I meant to write about it days ago when I finished, but every time I tried to write I couldn’t find the words. (It doesn’t help that I’ve been quite sick for a week). Very few TV shows are able to grapple with these extraordinarily difficult topics with such nuance and care. Nothing here is glamorized. It’s not being done for shock value. Baby Reindeer simply shows us how abuse and trauma create problems that can be so cyclical and intractable that it can take years—an entire lifetime even—to ever overcome the damage.

I highly recommend this series, but go in knowing it’s a tough watch, with very graphic portrayals of sexaul assault and an examination of mental health issues that can be both very funny at times, and really tragic. The show itself is beautifully shot with some truly outstanding performances from its leads. Both Gadd and Gunning deserve awards as Donny and Martha. Easily two of the finest performances I’ve seen all year. Baby Reindeer will sit with me, I think, for a very long time.

3 Body Problem (2024)

from the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/arts/television/3-body-problem-netflix-review.html

3 Body Problem

By James Poniewozik
March 20, 2024


The aliens who menace humankind in Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” believe in doing a lot with a little. Specifically, they can unfold a single proton into multiple higher dimensions, enabling them to print computer circuits with the surface area of a planet onto a particle smaller than a pinprick.

“3 Body Problem,” the audacious adaptation of a hard-sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin, is a comparable feat of engineering and compression. Its first season, arriving Thursday, wrestles Liu’s inventions and physics explainers onto the screen with visual grandeur, thrills and wow moments. If one thing holds it back from greatness, it’s the characters, who could have used some alien technology to lend them an extra dimension or two. But the series’s scale and mind-bending turns may leave you too starry-eyed to notice.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, partnering here with Alexander Woo (“The Terror: Infamy”), are best known for translating George R.R. Martin’s incomplete “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy saga into “Game of Thrones.” Whatever your opinions of that series — and there are plenty — it laid out the duo’s strengths as adapters and their weaknesses as creators of original material.

Beginning with Martin’s finished novels, Benioff and Weiss converted the sprawling tomes into heady popcorn TV with epic battles and intimate conversations. Toward the end, working from outlines or less, they rushed to a finish and let visual spectacle overshadow the once-vivid characters.


In “3 Body,” however, they and Woo have a complete story to work with, and it’s a doozy. It announces its sweep up front, opening with a Chinese scientist’s public execution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then jumping to the present day, when a wave of notable physicists are inexplicably dying by suicide.

The deaths may be related to several strange phenomena. Experiments in particle accelerators around the world suddenly find that the last several decades’ worth of research is wrong. Brilliant scientific minds are being sent futuristic headsets of unknown provenance that invite them to join an uncannily realistic virtual-reality game. Oh, also, one night all the stars in the sky start blinking on and off.

It all suggests the working of an advanced power, not of the cuddly E.T. variety. What starts as a detective mystery, pursued by the rumpled intelligence investigator Clarence Da Shi (Benedict Wong), escalates to a looming war of the worlds. What the aliens want and what they might do to get it is unclear at first, but as Clarence intuits, “Usually when people with more advanced technology encounter people with more primitive technology, doesn’t work out well for the primitives.”

Most of the first season’s plot comes straight from Liu’s work. The biggest changes are in story structure and location. Liu’s trilogy, while wide-ranging, focused largely on Chinese characters and had specifically Chinese historical and political overtones. Benioff, Weiss and Woo have globalized the story, shifting much of the action to London, with a multiethnic cast. (Viewers interested in a more literal rendition of Liu’s story can watch last year’s stiff but thorough Chinese adaptation on Peacock.)

They’ve also given Liu’s heavy science a dose of the humanities. Liu is a brilliant novelist of speculative ideas, but his characters can read like figures from story problems. In the series, a little playful dialogue goes a long way toward leavening all the Physics 101.

So does casting. Wong puffs life into his generically hard-boiled gumshoe. Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth in “Thrones”) stands out as Thomas Wade, a sharp-tongued spymaster, as does Rosalind Chao as Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist whose brutal experience in the Cultural Revolution makes her question her allegiance to humanity. Zine Tseng is also excellent as the young Ye.

More curious, if understandable, is the decision to shuffle and reconfigure characters from throughout Liu’s trilogy into a clique of five attractive Oxford-grad prodigies who carry much of the narrative: Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), a dogged physicist with personal ties to the dead-scientists case; Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), an idealistic nanofibers researcher; Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), a gifted but jaded research assistant; Will Downing (Alex Sharp), a sweet-natured teacher with a crush on Jin; and Jack Rooney (John Bradley of “Thrones”), a scientist turned snack-food entrepreneur and the principal source of comic relief.

John Bradley and Jess Hong in “3 Body Problem.” Part of the series takes place in a virtual-reality world reached via a mysterious headset.Credit...Netflix


The writers manage to bump up Liu’s one-dimensional characterizations to two-ish, but the “Oxford Five,” with the exception of Jin, don’t feel entirely rounded. This is no small thing; in a fantastical series like “Thrones” or “Lost,” it is the memorable individuals — your Arya Starks and your Ben Linuses — who hold you through the ups and downs of the story.

The plot, however, is dizzying and the world-building immersive, and the reportedly galactic budget looks well and creatively spent on the screen. Take the virtual-reality scenes, through which “3 Body” gradually reveals its stakes and the aliens’ motives. Each character who dons the headset finds themselves in an otherworldly version of an ancient kingdom — China for Jin, England for Jack — which they are challenged to save from repeating cataclysms caused by the presence of three suns (hence the series’s title).

“3 Body” has a streak of techno-optimism even at its bleakest moments, the belief that the physical universe is explicable even when cruel. The universe’s inhabitants are another matter. Alongside the race to save humanity is the question of whether humanity is worth saving — a group of alien sympathizers, led by a billionaire environmentalist (Jonathan Pryce), decides that Earth would benefit from a good cosmic intervention.

All this attaches the show’s brainiac spectacle to big humanistic ideas. The threat in “3 Body” is looming rather than imminent — these are not the kind of aliens who pull up quick and vaporize the White House — which makes for a parallel to the existential but gradual threat of climate change. Like “Thrones,” with its White Walkers lurking beyond the Wall, “3 Body” is in part a collective-action problem.

It is also morally provocative. Liu’s novels make an argument that in a cold, indifferent universe, survival can require a hard heart; basing decisions on personal conscience can be a kind of selfishness and folly. The series is a bit more sentimental, emphasizing relationships and individual agency over game theory and determinism. But it’s willing to go dark: In a striking midseason episode, the heroes make a morally gray decision in the name of planetary security, and the consequences are depicted in horrifying detail.

Viewers new to the story should find it exciting on its own. (You do not need to have read the books first; you should never need to read the books to watch a TV series.) But the book trilogy does go to some weird, grim — and presumably challenging to film — places, and it will be interesting to see if and how future seasons follow.

For now, there’s flair, ambition and galaxy-brain twists aplenty. Sure, this kind of story is tough to pull off beginning to end (see, again, “Game of Thrones”). But what’s the thrill in creating a headily expanding universe if there’s no risk of it collapsing?

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