Eric Netflix: The True Story of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Disturbing Miniseries On Netflix

Benedict Cumberbatch stars in Eric, a disturbing Netflix miniseries set in the ’80s and beginning with the disappearance of a child. The series follows Vincent, a man who works on a children’s television show and leads a privileged life with his family in New York. Beneath the surface, the family is full of problems, and everything explodes when his 9-year-old son, Edgar, mysteriously disappears while walking a few blocks from his house to school. Edgar’s disappearance sparks a huge investigation and quickly becomes the news everyone is talking about. The media goes crazy with the story, criticizing the father for letting the boy walk to school alone and analyzing every family secret.

At the same time, Vincent is convinced that if he can create a puppet that his son designed and bring to his program television, the child would be able to see it and know that his family is looking for him, increasing his chances of returning home. Along with this story, another mother searches for her son who also disappeared years ago and who has now become a fixed image on milk cartons and a series of posters announcing his disappearance, but in a city full of crime and missing children, finding Edgar this other child is a very complicated task. The crime and suspense series are moving and tense, it reveals a series of secrets that seem to change everything with each chapter and talks about a broken system full of problems, although it is mostly fiction, it is also based on real events and in a famous case of a missing child.

Eric Netflix: The True Story of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Disturbing Miniseries

Abi Morgan, the creator of the series with Benedict Cumberbatch, told RadioTimes that, although the series is not based on a case that happened, it is inspired by a series of disappearances of children in the 80s and at that time in that their photos began to appear on milk cartons, as a way to reach more people and try to get information.

“Well, I mean, funnily enough, I think growing up in the UK in the ’80s, I remember being haunted by these stories of missing children, and then when I went to New York, I looked after a child in the mid-’80s. “While I was there, I saw the milk carton children and the missing people. That’s always been very disturbing,” Morgan told the outlet.

In the series, there is even a scene where we can see one of those milk cartons with a photo of a missing child. The practice began in the late 1970s when a 6-year-old boy named Etan Patz disappeared from a SoHo area in Manhattan and was never seen again. During the investigation. Etan became one of the first children to appear on a milk carton, which was a kind of campaign to make sure that more people knew the image him and could alert the authorities if they saw him or had any information.

Etan disappeared similarly to Edgar in the series Eric. The boy left his home in Manhattan, determined to go to a nearby store to buy a soda before going to school, and convinced his mother to let him walk alone for the first time, making a trip of just two blocks to the truck stop. Soon, Etan’s mother discovered that her son never arrived at school and called the police to report him missing. The authorities began to move to try to find the boy and even went to knock on all the doors in his neighborhood to look for him, but time passed, and Etan did not appear.

To help the investigation, it was decided to place Etan’s photo on the milk cartons that families bought at the supermarket. Two missing children had already appeared in the cartoons before. Still, Etan’s case was very famous and popularized the practice, and even led to the creation of a center especially dedicated to investigating cases of missing children. Sadly, Etan was never found, and no one knew what happened to him, but many cases of missing children were solved thanks to the practice of using milk cartons and the center that was created to investigate. In 2017, a man named Pedro Hernández, who revealed in a conversation that he had killed a child, was finally arrested and charged with the disappearance of Etan, who was officially declared dead in 2001.