If you’ve watched the hit Netflix series, you might turn your head and wonder if Eric is based on a true story. The plot echoes some stories from the 1980s, but is the series based on one real-life tale?
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Vincent, a New York City master puppeteer and creator of Sesame Street-like show Good Day Sunshine. When his son Edgar (Ivan Morris) goes missing, Vincent becomes increasingly distressed and volatile. Using his puppeteering skills after finding a sketch of his son’s drawing, Vincent tries to build a puppet based on it called Eric. But his pursuit becomes an obsessed game alienating his family, his work colleagues, and the detectives trying to help him. The only thing that will help him is his delusions of Eric.
While some parts of the series might seem bizarre to the mind, several components to it ring true today.
Is Eric based on a true story?
While Eric isn’t based on a true story, creator Abi Morgan explained that it was derived from different stories from a specific era. “Well, I mean, weirdly actually, I think growing up in the UK in the ’80s, I remember being haunted by those stories of children who had gone missing, and then when I went to New York, I looked after a young boy in New York in the mid-’80s,” she told RadioTimes.
She continued. “While I was out there, I saw the milk carton kids and the missing persons. So that has always been very haunting. I don’t think it was ever based on one specific case, but I think in choosing to go back to that time, I wanted to go back to that very vivid period in history where, obviously, there were those cases.”
Though the show takes place in New York, the show could be placed in plenty of cities. “But in many ways, it was more a kind of shout-out to those cities where kids can go missing,” she said. “At the heart of the show is Vincent’s belief that ‘I want to live in a world where a child goes out into the world and can come home safe’. I guess that’s the kind of callout at the centre of the show, is that we all want to live in that world – but unfortunately, there are monsters in the most surprising places. I guess that’s what’s at the heart of Eric, this quest for a father to find his son, but also a man who’s then having to explore the monsters in himself and the city he’s grown up in.”
She expanded on her characters after reading up on several missing children’s stories. She told USA Today, “I wanted to create a kind of everychild; the simple act of going out one day and not coming home felt very resonant.”
