‘It’s been a crazy five years’: Abi Morgan on

The screenwriter’s latest drama is about a misanthropic puppeteer whose mind unravels when his son goes missing. She reveals how divorce, breast cancer and teenage trips to New York inspired it

“I’ve always had a real fetish,” says Abi Morgan, “for films where New York is a character in the drama.” The playwright and screenwriter reels off Taxi Driver, Kramer vs Kramer and Tootsie as examples – films so evocative of their time and place that they could be identified by shades of 1980s New York carpet alone.

There is something similarly magical about Morgan’s new show, Eric, that goes way beyond nostalgia. It conjures New York with the romantic intensity of the teenager she was when she first set foot there in 1986. “I was 18,” she recalls. “It felt like Starsky & Hutch. It felt like Cagney & Lacey. I couldn’t believe how New York New York was.” Fresh out of Camp America – where older, international teens help out in summer camps – she went on to au pair one of the kids for a while, and after that returned to the US often. “I was so crazy about America, I remember what I ordered the first day McDonald’s came to Stoke.”