No one is likely to accuse Netflix’s new limited series Eric of a lack of ambition. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and created by British playwright and TV veteran Abi Morgan (River, The Split), it fairly crackles with aspirational energy. The problem is the series’s utter inability to find a coherent tone. Imagine Mrs. Doubtfire embroiled in a nightmarish conspiracy, and you will have some idea of why Eric fails. 

The production drinks from several streams, many of them nourishing. Alas, having drunk its fill, it stumbles into town, weaves a careless circle, and falls dead in the marketplace. The show seems initially to be a police procedural, chronicling the search for a missing 9-year-old in 1985 New York. Allowed to walk to school for the first time, Edgar Anderson (Ivan Morris Howe) has vanished in broad daylight, a victim — or is he? — of the city’s pre-Giuliani lawlessness. Naturally fearing the worst are parents Vinny and Cassie, played with almost superhuman charmlessness by Cumberbatch and Gaby Hoffmann, respectively. In a nod to Gone Baby Gone (2007), one of the series’s obvious influences, the Andersons are revealed in a flashback to be bad parents and worse spouses, hurling obscenities at one another while a distressed Edgar cowers. Might the boy have been taken for his own good, perhaps by the building’s friendly if unsavory superintendent, George (The Wire’s Clarke Peters)?