The Sandman

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman" had so much potential, but it's wasted on a dull, dragging show.

The series is beautifully shot, and faithful to the Gothic art of the comics. I tried because I love fantasy and I love much of Gaiman's other work, both on the page and on screen. He's among a family of anthropomorphic concepts, like Desire (Mason Alexander Park) and Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste, whose episode is the best thing about the series by far). At the start, Dream (sometimes called Morpheus) is captured by a lucky human sorcerer (Charles Dance), imprisoned and silent in the waking world for over a century. The series (now streaming; ★½ out of four) is a middling series, made worse by wasted potential and Netflix's dollars. Excruciatingly slow and dull if not outright boring, "Sandman" is a perplexing failure. Years in the making, and painstakingly brought to life through what looks like very expensive computer imaging and intricate costuming and set design, "Sandman" has the potential to be very good, even great.

Neil Gaiman's acclaimed comic The Sandman is finally realized on screen as a 2022 Netflix series. Season 1 is about as good as fans can hope — but it mostly ...

In spite of being the best possible version of a Netflix adaptation, it is still a Netflix adaptation — a project that must hew to the limitations and aspirations of the platform, to create a bingeable experience with potential to become a monster hit. It was a work of alternative art published alongside the heteronormative corpus of DC Comics, growing in estimation until its counterculture leanings effectively became the culture — an ambition that was always there, as Sandman would grow to become a story about all stories, from Shakespeare to ancient Greece to superhero comics. But in reality he is just a brooding, pouty Englishman — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you learn (not a spoiler) that he is but one of the Endless, with older and younger siblings that also personify abstractions like Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) or Desire (Mason Alexander Park). Ultimately, The Sandman is effective as an alluring and sometimes odd advertisement for the comic book, which sounds like damning with faint praise but may actually be the desired outcome. As Dream gathers relics of his power, The Sandman shows viewers the breadth of the show. And will it prove those who hold the comic, a singular work of the medium, as “unadaptable” correct?

Since 1991, when Neil Gaiman was first approached about turning his dark fantasy comic book series into a film, there have been at least three separate attempts ...

To the many fans of Neil Gaiman's comic book series: Relax. The new Netflix show nails it.

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Netflix's 'The Sandman' finally brings Neil Gaiman's comic book series to life onscreen, with Tom Sturridge playing Dream aka Lord Morpheus.

With enough forward-facing momentum and the might of Gaiman’s ever-complicating lore behind, Netflix’s “The Sandman” justifies its existence — and the potential for so much more story to come — time and time again. Though The Corinthian looms large throughout, the first several episodes send Dream on a hunt throughout the waking world for his beloved “tools,” which acts as a useful introduction to his powers and attitude towards his human subjects; in the back of the season, the show shifts towards explaining Dream’s siblings and precarious place amongst them as the clock ticks down to a potential catastrophe. But one of the smartest aspects of Gaiman’s initial approach to sketching out the series’ enormous mythos is that the story weaves in plenty of other main characters for the audience to latch onto when Dream is too busy moping to be compelling. Knowing this 1989 title had spawned onscreen spinoffs of “Sandman” characters — “Lucifer,” “Constantine,” etcetera — but never one of its own, it was hard not to wonder what about it might have made a live-action version so hard that it never happened until now. For another, the TV show threads the entire season with the lurking threat of “The Corinthian,” a vicious rogue nightmare played by Boyd Holbrook with a chilling, silken smirk. All it has to do to bring us up to speed is explain that The Sandman (aka Dream, played with gravel-voiced gravitas by Tom Sturridge) is one of several siblings who rule crucial aspects of humanity, from Dream, to Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), to the twins of Desire (Mason Alexander Park) and Despair (Donna Preston). From there, you’re either in or you’re out, and off it goes.

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman stars Tom Sturridge and Gwendoline Christie and starts streaming on August 5th.

Buoyed by trust, wholesomeness, and acceptance, it is a series that at once depicts the horrors of humanity and our place in an unknowable and terrifying existence, but it also shows us how our humanity unites us to confront the failures of the world and our fears of everything else. This is what Sandman is all about as a franchise, and the TV series captures this. For example, Rose Walker is trying to find her missing brother, confronting serial killers and talking ravens, but is also on the verge of destroying the universe. One of the reasons I loved the book franchise was that it is first and foremost a psychological horror story, but it’s one painted on a canvas of the cosmic with a fragile brush made of hope. The second major arc details Dream’s attempt to find an entity called a vortex — a human, named Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai) who draws all dreams to herself, collapsing the waking and dream world and thus ending the universe. At the same time, she is discovering her powers as the vortex. So begins the first arc and his adventures with everyone from a blue-collar exorcist to a manchild wielding the powers of the gods. However, instead of capturing Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the Magus and his cult capture Dream, aka the Sandman — along with some of Dream’s powerful tools. To fix the world of Dreams, he must recover the tools his human captors took from him. For more than a century, Dream never utters a word, refusing to provide any details to his captors — whose lives are extended as a result of their proximity to his powerful tools. The Sandman is a dark fantasy horror comic franchise written primarily by Neil Gaiman, who also served as an executive producer and writer on the Netflix adaptation. But “adaptation” is almost an insult to what the creators achieved.

But did we? Because the Sandman comic series is, at its core, about the very nature of stories, one can't help but be amused that reviewing this new iteration ...

And on the other end of the spectrum, the show is too obviously a work of fantasy and nerd culture to appeal to viewers just looking for the next great adult drama. Well, this show was his chance, and Gaiman could have spent the extra time and space granted by a different medium to show more of what Dream and Hob discussed over the centuries. While it’s a bit difficult to describe what “The Sandman” is, it’s quite easy to say what it’s not. But TV is a writer’s medium, and despite Gaiman co-running the show with two other veteran writers known for their acclaimed work in comic adaptations— David S. Goyer (who co-wrote “ The Dark Knight” trilogy) and Allan Heinberg (who co-wrote 2017’s “ Wonder Woman”)—they all apparently approached their job as glorified transcription. Sure, there are a few changes, but most of them are just the show eliminating attempts of the comic series to fit into the larger DC Universe of the time, such as guest appearances by John Constantine, Etrigan the Demon, and the Martian Manhunter, or an issue that was partially set in Arkham Asylum. To put it another way: the show changed almost nothing it didn’t need to change. But that doesn’t describe all fans, and presumably more than a few of them will grow weary of just how unimaginative—how sadly undreamt about—this series of dreams really is. In an interview for the 1999 book The Sandman Companion, Gaiman even admitted that he was sad to finish the issue, and he would have loved to carry on the conversations between Dream and Hob “indefinitely.” And that’s what should have happened in the TV series, which absolutely had the time and space to reimagine these conversations for a different medium. It originally began as a DC Comics series in 1988, and it lasted 75 issues before ending in 1996, becoming one of the first ongoing DC or Marvel series to end solely by creative decision rather than by a sales-motivated one. Because the Sandman comic series is, at its core, about the very nature of stories, one can’t help but be amused that reviewing this new iteration of it becomes a debate about the very nature of adapting stories. And both are adapted nearly page for page, word for word, into the sixth episode of the show. Countless diehard fans of the source material are no doubt tempted to think today, “We did it.”

The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman's legendary comics series about Dream of the Endless and his adventures against his siblings and others, ...

And what the TV series leaves out entirely is another, such as the events of issue nine, “Tales in the Sand.” In that story, a younger, more impetuous Dream essentially ruins a human woman’s life when she dares refuse his love, and that dickishness clicks into focus the spontaneity and selfishness of the Endless, an essential theme of the comics that the series gestures toward but doesn’t contextualize. The result is an uneasy mixture of beat-for-beat mimicries of issues like “The Sound of Her Wings” and “Men of Good Fortune,” which are combined in the season’s sixth installment, and other drastic changes that take screen time away from Dream and don’t stand on their own as TV inventions. Dream spends thousands of years as a pouty asshole with some gracefully simplistic goth outfits and some not very empathetic views on people, and the rapidness with which The Sandman tosses off that version of the character to make him more traditionally heroic underserves the comics’ core ideas about the grueling and interrogating work that change requires. What The Sandman as a TV series fails to imagine on its own is one issue: The comics skip over showing Dream rebuilding the world harmed by his ruby, but why not show that process here? The Sandman trade paperbacks that serve as source material for this series — Preludes & Nocturnes, a sort of coming-of-age story for Dream, and The Doll’s House, an expansion of the universe in which he lives and rules — are both exposition-heavy affairs that rely on our attraction to the Sandman himself: to his mysterious regality and his assured haughtiness, his melancholy burden and his strict sense of his own superiority, not to mention the aesthetics of those inky eyes, Robert Smith mop, and all-black outfits. (And now that there is an established DC Extended Universe onscreen that this series is not part of, the comics’ mentions of the Justice League, Gotham City, and Arkham Asylum don’t survive the transfer.) The boundless creativity of drawn illustration can’t always be replicated via visual effects, practical locations, or the budget required for both in TV. Hour-long episodic run times might mean that a plot has to be divided and reorganized differently from how it was in a book.

Fans of the Neil Gaiman comic should find lots to love in Netflix's adaptation of The Sandman.

But he carries himself with a sort of ethereal aloofness that cuts to the core of the character, and it's not hard to buy him as a being that is not human but becomes more like one over the course of the story. There's no doubt that a so-far-unannounced second season could help deepen and enrich some characters that don't feel fully formed during the first go-round but still have large parts to play. Even if the rest of the series didn't work, Netflix's The Sandman would be worth it for these two hours, with the sixth episode in particular emotionally resonating at the impressive level the comic was often able to reach. One common complaint might be that the Rose Walker/Dream Vortex arc that closes out the season ends up being the show's weakest, and it's true those episodes suffer from some tonal inconsistencies as well as a few performances by actors who clearly aren't as seasoned as, say, Dance or Thewlis. There are also some roles that don't get enough screentime to be as effective as you might remember from the page. And while Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer seems like great casting in theory, the TV show version of the character never quite matches its devilishly charming comic-book counterpart. Other standouts of the large cast (some of whom only appear for an episode or two) include the perfectly cast Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death; David Thewlis as John Dee, an unwell man with dark ambitions who comes in possession of Dream's magical ruby dreamstone; and Ferdinand Kingsley as Hob Gadling, a human who is granted immortality by Death and, over the decades, develops a unique friendship with Dream. Those three end up serving as the focal points of Episodes 5 and 6 — two hours that serve as the undisputed highpoints of the season. And, fourth, a young woman named Rose Walker (Kyo Ra) has been identified as a Dream Vortex, a human who has the power to enter the dreams of others and impose her will upon The Dreaming. Netflix's The Sandman (which was produced by Warner Bros. Television with Heinberg as the showrunner and Gaiman heavily involved) is a faithful and loving adaptation of a comic that many hold dear, and the series is able to retain much of the source material's strengths without making any serious missteps that would cast a shadow over the whole enterprise. But the basic structure of the comic remains intact, with Dream's quests taking him to locations as exotic as Hell and as terrifying as Florida. To non-fans, this may all sound like a bunch of gibberish, and it's to the show's credit that it is able to translate the comic book's lyrical but sometimes labyrinthine story to the screen in a way that feels natural and welcoming. (Dream and Death are both part of the Endless, a "family" of beings representing a fundamental aspect of humanity.) The show states its epic intentions early with a first episode that covers more than a century of time, as a sleeping sickness plagues the world while Dream remains in captivity. The show starts as the comic does, with Morpheus becoming imprisoned by a mortal magician (Charles Dance) who was trying to capture Dream's sister, Death, and ended up with the wrong god in his basement. As far as precarious fantasy adaptations go, the end result is much closer on the spectrum to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings than it is to, say, that misguided Dark Tower movie that came out a few years ago.

The TV adaptation is extremely loyal to Neil Gaiman's original comic books—and that's as enticing as it is frustrating.

Where the series cannot hope to compare to the comics is in its visuals; although the CGI in The Sandman is lavish and ever present, it can’t render a dreamworld in as impressionistic a style as an illustrated comic can. Their showdown is one of the most arresting and horrifying Sandman issues ever published, but I found the TV edition surprisingly grating, hampered perhaps by the attempt to stretch a few dozen pages of comics into an hour of television. During his journeys, he voyages to hell to barter with its ruler, Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie), and meets up with his sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), the cheerful and levelheaded guardian of all mortality. In the premiere, Dream is kidnapped and imprisoned in the early 20th century by an occultist named Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance). The story develops over decades as Dream escapes and then works to rebuild his kingdom, seeking lost artifacts and gathering up stray nightmares. Devotees of The Sandman such as myself will have much to exult in with Netflix’s version, but I wonder what the show will mean to newcomers. The Netflix adaptation, created by Gaiman, David S. Goyer, and Allan Heinberg, embraces that pacing, letting things unfold with the care of a monthly comic rather than the punchiness of weekly TV. It makes for some very high highs—and a few languorous lows.

The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman has been long anticipated both by early fans of the DC comic and by those who have come to enjoy the many wonderful ...

Soon The Sandman will be added to the list of shows for which they are known and admired. Although Mark Hamill will always be Luke Skywalker and Patton Oswalt has his own resume of guest appearances in nerdy fare across the spectrum, they also both have a rich history of providing their unique voices to animated characters. Boyd Holbrook will play The Corinthian in The Sandman, a nightmare who escapes into the world to become a serial killer. In The Sandman he plays John Dee, who attempts to steal some of Dream’s power, but as Ares in Wonder Woman, he was a god who had plenty of his own. Viewers may also know Thewlis from his role as V. M. Varga in season three of Fargo, or they may have heard his voice in Big Mouth or Human Resources, in which he plays Shame Wizard. Mason Alexander Park is another Broadway heavyweight coming to the small screen, best known for their lead performance in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. You may also remember them from their role as Gren in the short-lived live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptation.

Netflix's 2022 adaptation of The Sandman takes only a few liberties with the ending. But what is next for Dream? And will Lucifer enter new realms with the ...

That’s how Dream met up with the Justice League, and it’s how Will “Shakesbeard” might have something to offer Dream of the Endless. “And we get to do an awful lot of the side stories and interesting byways and diversions along the way.” Though the show has rearranged the storylines a bit to fit into the arc of the season, it seems likely that they could return in season 2 (or beyond). Of course, the root of the word certainly suggests a bit of judgment on the part of the remaining Endless siblings, as opposed to merely an abdication of duty. The answer is slow-played in Sandman season 1; beyond a few mentions, we get little by way of details. With 75 issues in the original run of the series, there’s certainly a lot for The Sandman to get through, should Netflix allow it. But as the comics continued, there was less emphasis on the overall arc of the story and more on the small, almost vignette-like chapters of Dream’s journeys. One of them is to not spill “family blood,” or else bad news will befall you — namely you summon the Furies, who are no joke and will be mad. Lord Azazel pops up to share something on behalf of the “assembled lords of hell.” In episode 10 (or even the full season) we don’t get a sense of what’s so taboo about it. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of details to keep track of, even if you did read the comics. As Dream learns in the final moments of season 1, Rose Walker’s whole existence is predicated on Desire having impregnated Unity while she was asleep during Dream’s absence.

The Sandman. Tom Sturridge as Dream in episode 101 of The Sandman. Photo: Netflix. This The Sandman review contains NO SPOILERS and is based on ...

But ultimately, The Sandman belongs to Sturridge, Holbrook, and the showrunner team. In fact, Sturridge’s performance is the place where the difference between the show and the comic is most stark. You see the hurt in his squint of eyes, his uncertainty in the way his shoulders stoop for a moment, his nobility in the way he gathers them back up. Adapting a comic as visually striking and inventive as The Sandman was always going to be complicated. As for capturing the iconic characters, the casting for this show is superlative. The series, adapted for television by Allan Heinberg, David Goyer, and Gaiman himself, follows Dream of the Endless as he is captured by a human warlock and held in captivity for 100 years.

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Early reactions signal that Gaiman’s fervent fans, who long feared the formidable work unadaptable, are thrilled by the result.” Finally, if you like your action movies with a twist, check out the latest flick in the Predator franchise, Prey, featuring breakout star Amber Midthunder—an Indigenous actress who is Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota—as a hunter battling the threat of the monster that lurks at the edge of her community. All 10 episodes of The Sandman are now streaming on Netflix.

Here's the ultimate breakdown of The Sandman season 1 finale. What happened to Rose and Jed?! After being saved from Fun Land by The Corinthian, Rose Walker ...

And with Desire and some of the other siblings taking a stand against Dream, things will definitely get harder for Morpheus as he tries to save the lands. Unity tells Rose to pass on her the power of the vortex, which she is able to do. Meanwhile, Dream creates new dreams and nightmares to replace the ones that were lost. Hal says he had a dream of moving back to New York and might join them on the journey back, but he would need to sell the house. Meeting up with the rest of the house members, Rose tells them that they're all planning to move back to New Jersey the next day. Back at Lucienne's library, Unity is seen walking through the stacks and asks to see the book of her life. Dream suddenly appears and tells him that he's disappointed in what he's done, but the Corinthian points out he's only done what he's been made to do. Rose also reveals to Lyta that she has to make a decision before she falls asleep and the only way to protect both worlds is if she sacrifices herself, also killing the vortex in the process. Both the Corinthian and Dream also enter the dream world to convince Rose to join their side. The Corinthian tries to attack Dream with a knife, and the two start fighting. So what exactly happened to Dream and the world of the living? Rose and Jed escape the "cereal convention" and head back home.

The enduringly popular comic book series about gods and the afterlife gets the big-bucks, amazing-cast Netflix treatment. And it's good. Very good, in fact.

These two episodes – one set in a diner, one set in the same pub at hundred-year intervals – really show what you can do with one story and one character and one hour of ingenuity, and give the whole series more of an anthology feel than an endless story where someone does hand gestures a lot and magic comes out. I have a potted history with fantasy television: we had a lot of it a couple of years ago, almost all of it bad, because they ignored the two primary rules for fantasy that I have made up and never actually bothered to tell anybody. Boyd Holbrook is having an awful lot of fun playing the Corinthian, a devilish nightmare with teeth instead of eyes. The former is a lot rarer than the latter, sadly, and culturally we are poorer for it. What if a supernatural cabal actually ran the government but started getting nosebleeds and died? So it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I have watched The Sandman (available now on Netflix), the Netflix x Warner x DC crossover event of the summer.

A man holding a helmet superimposed over comic book pages. Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comics come to life. Credit: Mashable Composite: Netflix; DC Comics / Vertigo ...

His role in the comics is contained to The Doll's House arc, which is effective as we move from issue to issue. I also appreciated the connection between Lyta and Rose, as it pulls together characters from important early threads of The Sandman and gives us another chance to see the effects of Rose's role as the dream vortex. They prop him up as their own version of the Sandman in an attempt to create a new head of the Dreaming. Hector visits his pregnant wife Lyta in the dream realm so the two have more time together, and occasionally Lyta is visited by Jed Walker (Eddie Karanja), the little brother of Rose Walker (Kyo Ra). However, when Dream finds out about what Brute and Glob have done, he casts Hector back to the land of the dead and declares he will return for Lyta's child — who, by virtue of its time spent gestating in the Dreaming, is now his. It might not be bursting at the brim with Justice League references, but The Sandman is still a DC comic. In the show, Ethel gives John the amulet directly and then dies onscreen as the protections fade away. The show takes that opportunity for new material and runs with it, incorporating several of Hal's numbers into the show and casting Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell as Rose Walker's drag-performing landlord. The second half of the episode is an extremely faithful adaptation of issue 13, Men of Good Fortune. There, we learn about Dream's once-a-century meeting with the immortal human Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley). But that's not the only way in which The Sandman diverges from its source material. Upon his escape decades later, he must restore order to the Dreaming while contending with the chaos that ensued both in his world and the waking world while he was gone. The first half of the episode is an extremely faithful adaptation of the comic issue of the same name, which sees Dream and Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) walking around and having a conversation about humanity. Having the stories play out simultaneously gives us a solid A plot and B plot as our protagonist and our antagonist hunt down Dream's magical tools, teasing the inevitable showdown. Showrunner Allan Heinberg and executive producers David S. Goyer and Gaiman have adapted the first 16 issues of the comics into a 10 episode-long season that, while most certainly not perfect, clearly works hard to do justice to and maintain the spirit of the originals.