One of the biggest TV shows across all the major streamers at the moment is a new Netflix drama about inner demons, monsters both real and imagined, and children lost on the gritty streets of 1980s New York City.
Eric stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent Anderson, father to a 9-year-old son named Edgar and also the troubled creator of an 80s children’s show called Good Day Sunshine. At its core, Eric is a show about monsters — both the physical sort, as well as the psychological kind that hide in the darkest corners of the mind.
Vincent’s son Edgar is missing. To keep his hope alive, Vincent, who’s also a puppeteer, clings to his son’s drawings of a blue monster called Eric. Vincent figures that if he can somehow work his son’s creature onto his own TV show, notwithstanding the deterioration of his own mental health, his son will see it and come home. Meanwhile, Eric starts to invade Vincent’s daily life (or so he imagines).
It’s certainly a different sort of project for Cumberbatch, who we’re most accustomed to seeing on the big screen. Nevertheless, the show (which has a 73% critic’s score on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing) is not only one of the biggest Netflix series in the world right now. It’s also the top show across all of the streaming this week. That’s according to the streaming search engine Reelgood, which tracks the most popular TV shows from all of the major streamers — including Netflix, Max, Apple TV+, Hulu, Disney+, Prime Video, Peacock, and more.
Reelgood says it monitors 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US. For the 7-day period that ended on June 5, the 10 shows that topped Reelgood’s latest TV chart are as follows:
- Eric (Netflix)
- Dark Matter (Apple TV+)
- The Acolyte (Disney+)
- Evil (Paramount+)
- Tires (Netflix)
- Fallout (Prime Video)
- Hacks (Max)
- Under the Bridge (Hulu)
- Mayor of Kingstown (Paramount+)
- Outer Range (Prime Video)
As for the rest of the TV shows besides Eric that are among the most popular this week, they range from enduring hits like Prime Video’s Fallout and Apple’s Dark Matter to Disney+’s new Star Wars drama The Acolyte — about which the less is said, the better.
I mean, it’s not just that Disney has spent a few years now basically taking a dump on every piece of Star Wars that it touches (minus the rare exception, like Andor). It’s that, in the rabid push to turn yet another beloved franchise inside out after ideologues take over, they don’t even bother to hire people who love or even know basic facts about the franchise anymore.
You know those teachers we all ran into at one point growing up, the ones who clearly despise children yet went into the profession anyway? Star Wars, for whatever reason, seems to attract the exact same kind of people.
I recommend skipping The Acolyte altogether and watching something like HBO’s Hacks instead. It’s a show about a legendary but aging comedian and the young hotshot writer she teams up with — and what’s great about it is the way it not only tackles themes like ageism in entertainment, but also features a great female friendship at the core of its story. Not the kind of thing you see from a streamer every day.
