In times of crisis it is useful to be a writer. I’m not saying it, a writer says it: one of those who has most successfully fed current television and cinema. Abby Morgan just released Ericthe latest example of Netflix’s current good streak (Ripley, My stuffed reindeer and this in the last two months), which, when it sets its mind to it, is capable of offering its viewers first-class material. In order not to spoil it too much for those who have not yet approached it, Eric is the story of Vincent (Benedict Cumberbatch), a kind of Jim Henson, creator of a children’s television program with puppets, who suffers the disappearance of Edgar, his nine-year-old son in New York in the eighties. This confronts him with the enormous crisis that his marriage to Cassie (a wonderful Gaby Hoffmann) is suffering and with his worst self-destructive demons. But as you progress through its six episodes, Eric reveals much more than a marked personal story and begins to become a drawing of the underworld (and the uptown, sometimes lower than the others) of New York at that time and addresses issues that continue to resonate today far beyond the banks of the Hudson River, such as the housing problem.
When Abi Morgan said that in times of crisis it is useful to be a writer, she was referring to her personal crisis: since 2018 she has had to face her husband’s multiple sclerosis, which led him to be in an induced coma for more than a year, and his subsequent recovery, at the dawn of which he did not even recognize her, along with the breast cancer she suffered. All this, following in the wake of everything is copy by Nora Ephron, told it in her book This Is Not a Pity Memoir, still without translation in Spain. For Eric, she rescued part of her own experience as a nanny in New York at that time and of having grown up behind the scenes of different theaters through the work of her parents, a theater actress and director. I don’t know what personal experiences she fed the scripts from. Shame, The Hour either The Split, some of her best works, I don’t even need to know it to admire them, her, and, above all, her tremendous versatility as a screenwriter. I do not doubt the personal usefulness of writing, but yours is also a gift for others.
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