The following article contains major spoilers for Netflix's Eric . It's 1985, and New York City is awash with dirt and grime. In Eric , it's The Big Apple by way of Travis Bickle: crime and corruption are rife, staggering luxury condos tower over ramshackle homeless camps, and steam pours out of the manholes like a bloated corpse exhaling gas.
By Lucy Ford and Jack King Nevertheless, there's a light in the darkness. The morning show Good Day Sunshine , essentially Sesame Street without Elmo, offers hope for the city's kids — a rare pop of colour in a desaturated landscape, on TV at cereal-time sharp. Its creator is Vincent Anderson, a broken man who gave something good to the world, played by Benedict Cumberbatch with hints of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker.
But now, after its peak in the '70s, the show is on the ropes. Viewership has dwindled and the television studio executives standby ready to pick it off like a mafioso hit squad. So, all of this is going on, and then personal tragedy strikes, when Vincent's son Edgar (Ivan Morris Howe) goes missing.
At first he's wrongfully thought to have been snatched up by the downstairs neighbour (Clarke Peters) with a mirky past — he is Black, and there is more than an edge of pernicious racism in how quickly the cops jump to him being the perp — but the truth that unfolds is more complicated, unravelling a conspiracy that goes right to the top of city hall. Vincent was already losing his marbles before the series begins, but Edgar's .
