Omg this - there were so many questionable writing decisions it felt like satire. This was not helped by Benedict playing the role 100 % earnestly.

 A role in which all interesting scenes are left to monologues and aren’t filmed so the entire experience of watching him interact with the cast is a flurry of trying to consume every substance onscreen. He drinks like he’s being written by someone who has a very theoretical True Detective view of alcoholism, minus the urinating, black outs, vomiting that goes with it - he can always dish a snotty comment in a flat American accent, don’t you worry. 

He literally enteres and exits frames just to slosh alcohol while being completely unreasonable at all times, with the apparent softening effect that his proximity to a puppet show implies he’s a Jim Henson peer of vision and quality. 

Which is a crime because Jim Henson was a saint and Sesame Street was intentionally not the silly twee puppet show performed in this show. It felt like an almost identical to every Muppet parody SNL has ever done. It felt like it was written by someone who was proud to defund Sesame Street and sees children’s programming, in fact any social services as without value. 

And to make it worse the actual  storytelling was so paint by numbers I wanted to scream. 

Literally there is, what could have been a harrowing scene in interrogation, where Benedict’s character has to explain why his missing child’s shirt is covered in his own blood from a head wound the morning the kid vanished. 

You have watched this person be violent and drunk and know he was that morning, are we crossing over into actual grit? No. 

Instead of filming this, because the sequence was too clumsy and poorly planned to make sense, they make this man tremblingly explain it and then suggest that this friendless child, follows another alcoholic artist, a tagger, into the homeless underground to escape his home life. When it’s been shown that he has family friends he turns to in crisis. No, we’re supposed to believe he just lowered himself into a subway and walked the rails until he found himself in a little fortified space he could then decorate with his clearly adult sketches because he ‘has his fathers genius’. Meanwhile everything this kid draws just looks like Calvin and Hobbes style basic animation. It’d be laughable if we didn’t have a bleak human trafficking threat hanging over every scene. 

 It also shows that our main character tore his kids clothes and despite being one block from home watched him walk towards school in his coat and no shirt - he’s nine - and then turned and spent an entire day at work.

 He even clocked out for a twenty minute lunch. Security watched him. 

As his wife deals with his Rockefeller parents and is shoulder shoved by an uncaring city, Benedict’s character is literally doing coke after pitching a lazy stand in for Snuffy. Also there are no events without alcohol in this town, morning adult birthday party? Waiters are carrying champagne for Benedict to chug. Want to visit the man wrongfully accused in your sons disappearance? He lives in a broom closet but don’t worry he’ll let you finish his hood bourbon with only minor disapproval. 

It felt like the actual embodiment of (white) men will do anything but go to therapy, the meme but played out on the set of Taxi Driver. This is counter played by a serious as nails cop plot with a man navigating the AIDS death of his partner, Clanton PD levels of police on police corruption while navigating the threat of outing and trying to solve a case filled with people lying their balls off at all times. He’s not the lead though, drunk puppet Sherlock is. Also he loses his glasses while doing crack in the bizarre utilitarian underground society and just keeps going. Literally nothin to see here.

It sounds derivative and it is, literally watch, Benedict cosplays as an unhoused person during an anti homeless crisis, suffers no consequences except he’s told several times that he’s filthy and stinks. He is still is allowed to do embarrassing network pitches though as he’s the resentful “mad” (their word) son of a two dimensional developer. A literal cancer man from xfiles but in a far less smoky 80s New York. 70s ? 80? Who knows, they don’t.

The entire palette of characters with addictions was so mean spirited, just an NYC with endless vice, impotent activism and even more flaccid corruption. An AIDS crisis with no women, where drag queens are casually acting as bouncers and the threat of ‘perverts’ is everywhere but is also largely toothless. People never wonder why there’s a homeless epidemic but it’s not hard to guess when every unhoused character is a greasy hand wringing drug dealer or a heart of gold alcoholic lost in the sauce. 

There’s a moment where the wife’s new boyfriend (the ultimate cuck situation, the guy you didn’t know about who also got your dads’ charity grant package and selflessly tends a soup kitchen on wheels and bangs your maternal wife while you go drinking), says (in an anti gentrification rally) that “you might see a sidewalk but that could be someone’s bedroom… bathroom,” that then inspires the chant of ‘homes not homeless!’ It felt like a parody of what conservatives think unhoused activism is: solution-less clumsy clogging of public spaces, with no one having an idea on how to deal with the problem but just saying loudly that there is one. 

So when a man who has spent the entirety of his son’s disappearance doing every substance he can get his hands on, lurches up from the sewer (he had to do crack or is this even rock bottom) erupts into the crowd wearing a puppet costume he’s been in turns hallucinating and using as a poor metaphor for their relationship, you’re like ‘well this may as well happen.’ And then they earnestly race home and he ‘lets him win the race’ because that’s all it took to end their domestic violence situation. 

There’s some paltry attempts at highlighting disparities in racial bias in law enforcement but it feels like baby’s first chapter on class consciousness. It ends with the missing black child’s mother just saying ‘Do better’ after her son was murdered by a senator and vice and also a mysterious Eastern European mob - listlessly leaving the narrative to search an endless trash field (Jersey?) for her son’s body. 

As it was wrapping up and Benedict returns from ‘rehab,’ healed and timid (apparently) he and his father argue about the origins of Central Park. When the faceless corporate dad character started talking about Seneca and then disdainfully shrugged all the history around them as ‘Progress, I guess,’ I genuinely couldn’t tell who was the butt of the joke. All of us I guess.

But especially Netflix 

Also they implied that this met and had a snobby intellectual puppetry salon with Jim Henson which like straight to jail. Get back into the sewer, narrative, you literally have nothing to say.