Benedict Cumberbatch is a troubled puppet master in new Netflix series Eric

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Sometimes, a man needs to make a puppet in order to learn something about himself. And in Eric, that man is Benedict Cumberbatch.

The new Netflix series (launching May 30) follows Cumberbatch’s Vincent Anderson — the creator of a Sesame Street-esque children’s show called Good Day Sunshine — in 1980s New York when his young son goes missing. “I love thrillers, but I knew I wanted something emotional and psychological,” Eric creator Abi Morgan tells EW. “I grew up with my dad running a theater, so I was always seeing the magic behind the scenes. I was drawn to the idea of Vincent in the world of Good Day Sunshine.”

Morgan then paired pieces of her upbringing with her time spent in NYC in the ’80s. “As you walk around any great city, you start to see the upper class, the lower class, the underclass,” says Morgan, who won an Emmy in 2013 for writing BBC America’s The Hour. “That became a very intriguing world for me. Suddenly I looked at New York like a forest — so it’s the idea of a boy who goes missing in this forest and a quest of a father to go and find him.”

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That father is Vincent, a “narcissistic artist,” as Morgan explains, who struggles with addiction and convinces himself that his son will be found if he puts a puppet that his son designed, named Eric, on television. "Vincent's a very complicated, talented, but troubled man," star Benedict Cumberbatch says in the exclusive video above. "We meet him at a time where his world's been shaken up by his son's disappearance. He's a man struggling to come to terms with his mental state."

In the process of bringing his son's puppet creation to life, Vincent starts hallucinating a life-size version of Eric. “We’ve always tried to see Eric as a manifestation of the inner workings of Vincent’s psychosis,” Morgan says. “When I pitched it, I said it’s kind of a buddy movie of an obsessive puppeteer and his puppet who go looking for his son.” 

Cumberbatch adds, "He's utterly real for him."

The drama also follows Detective Michael Ledroit (McKinley Belcher III), the man trying to uncover the mystery of what happened to Vincent's son. "The show is not only interested in him as an officer and a detective, but as a Black gay man on the NYPD in the '80s in New York and all of the things that he's wrestling with," Belcher says of his character.

“It's really about two men who are struggling to understand their identity and having to confront their own demons from their past and their present,” Morgan says of Michael and Vincent. “The piece is also playing with male toxicity and the things we inherit from our fathers.”

It’s not often that one show tackles trauma, addiction, racism, homophobia, male toxicity, and… puppets. As Morgan puts it, “It felt like an opportunity to do something that would be playful but ultimately would have a dark, emotional, psychological heart and play with the idea of childhood and where we believe the monsters really lie and where we come to realize they really are.”

Eric premieres May 30 on Netflix.