The Sandman

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.

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?

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

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It's taken 35 years, but Neil Gaiman believes he's done the impossible: adapt his hugely successful comic book The Sandman for the screen.

Lucifer, an important antagonist early on, was mostly drawn to appear more typically masculine in the comics — though that isn't the case earlier on in Gaiman's books. It also has a ripple effect on various members of her family — also important figures in the story, who are similarly played by Black actors. Vanesu Samunyai plays Rose Walker, a major player in the "Doll's House" arc — her first ever credited role. That of course includes Dream himself, played by English actor Tom Sturridge, who was presented with another problem central to the story. Even a decade ago, a two-hour movie was seen as the place for big-budget story telling — and TV shows were locked into a rigid 21- or 42-minute frame. Gaiman himself spent decades shutting down attempts to bring his creation to the screen; there was just too much there for a traditional movie or TV show.

Netflix's adaptation of Neil Gaiman's graphic novel series, "The Sandman," has an excellent cast and some stand-out moments, but they risk getting lost in ...

Making him a bigger presence earlier on is one of The Sandman's smartest adaptation choices. One of The Sandman's best qualities is its cast, which delivers strong, committed performances across the board. Similar to the comics, the initial arc of the show is how Morpheus can get his things back once he is free, and also how he must go about setting the Dreaming back in order, as well as rectifying the chaos in the waking world his absence allowed. However, when The Sandman's characters are constantly reminding us of who they are and what they do — sometimes even unnecessarily recapping the previous episode's events — we lose valuable time getting to know them. Dream is one of the Endless, a family of powerful forces that includes Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and Desire (Mason Alexander Park). Unfortunately, when we first meet him, he's been captured by mortals dabbling in powerful magic. The result isn't a snooze by any stretch of the imagination.

For years it was conventional wisdom that an adaptation of The Sandman, the much-celebrated series of graphic novels from Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, ...

They show that it is possible to capture the story of the comics almost exactly without just feeling like a carbon copy, and that big, sprawling stories with deep themes can be brought to the screen without sacrificing what made them so special in the first place. There will likely be some criticism of the show from comic book fans who wanted to see the art style of the comics translated perfectly to the screen. Yet, as the story goes on, he learns to embrace humanity and see the good in them. The finale also feels somewhat rushed in having to tie up a storyline that didn't get as many episodes to flesh everything out. Clocking in at 10 episodes, Netflix's The Sandman, which was produced in association with Warner Bros., is an absolute home run of adapting comic book storytelling to screen. For years it was conventional wisdom that an adaptation of The Sandman, the much-celebrated series of graphic novels from Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, and Mike Dringenberg, would be impossible to properly pull off.

Neil Gaiman's landmark comic series The Sandman is many things: fantastical, idiosyncratic, dark as hell (sometimes literally!), and, honestly, often downright ...

“It’s certainly the one we spent the most time on—trying to figure out how to problem solve it, how to make it happen.” The Sandman’s fourth episode follows Dream on a journey into the realm of Lucifer Morningstar to retrieve the Helmet of Dreams, which has been stolen and traded away to a demon. Because we had a photoreal aspiration for something that was known—the thing was either going to look like a real bird, or it wasn’t.” “Basically, it’s like a train, and you try to make sure each car on the train is part of the whole train,” Steele laughs. “I’m really quite proud of Matthew, and I think the whole visual effects team is proud of Matthew,” Markiewicz says. But so much of it was just one step at a time and trying to figure out [what worked and what didn’t], and very quickly, we realized we had to be strategic with our time and resources and money. Part of the reason previous attempts to adapt The Sandman floundered is the sheer breadth of the story and the lore involved. “In terms of my prep, one of the things that Allan [Heinberg, showrunner of The Sandman] provided me with, which was gold, was the original comic book scripts from Neil Gaiman,” Markiewicz says. “I thought that [starting with] Neil’s notes was the perfect way for us to think about adapting the show,” he continues. [But he] is always going to be at the heart of things.” We were trying to keep it as cool as the graphic novel—stunning, sexy, and beautiful.’” “One of the big challenges on this show is just every episode [is different],” VFX supervisor Ian Markiewicz says.

It was a project long thought so unfilmable, even its creator didn't want anyone to try to adapt it. But it seems that despite recent quality control issues ...

The Sandman looks like a hit, and could turn into that “40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours of quality television” over time, that Gaiman is so excited about. The Sandman is not being presented as a limited series, meaning if it does well on Netflix, that it could come back for more. The Sandman is reviewing well so far among both critics and fans.

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.

Two new series from Netflix and Amazon, respectively, take a more unorthodox approach than the traditional superhero story.

The original Sandman included indelible images like a woman with a half-rotted face, or the King of Dreams shrouded in shadows. Not all ambition equates to big set pieces, and not all comics shows have to echo the Marvel model. American Gods had its faults, but it got gnarly and graphic in a way The Sandman never seems comfortable with—and that may be essential to conveying the essence of the text. Paper Girls has its fans, but the show faces nowhere near the pressure bearing down on The Sandman, a comic series that helped alter the trajectory of its entire medium. But it’s also a show in which the younger Erin expresses blunt disappointment in how her life will turn out: as a lonely paralegal living in her dead mother’s house. A movie would have to pick and choose which elements of the story to keep in the mix; a show can keep the comics’ digressive, anthological feel while saving some runway for presumptive future seasons. The Sandman has some semblance of an overarching plot: first, Dream’s quest to recover his powers after his decades-long imprisonment by an amateur occultist; then, the subtle tensions between Dream and other immortal beings, including his siblings—Destiny, Desire, and Despair—and Lucifer Morningstar, the fallen angel played in the show by Game of Thrones’ Gwendoline Christie. But the stories are frequently stand-alone, with some more compelling than others and little connective tissue besides Dream himself. The Umbrella Academy, a sort of steampunk riff on the X-Men conceived by My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way, has become one of the top-rated original series on Netflix. Green-lighting The Sandman feels like a clear attempt to replicate the latter’s success. As superhero comics—and even non-superhero comics, like The Walking Dead—have evolved into the most profitable franchises in entertainment, they’ve also had something of a trickle-down effect, allowing stories with more unconventional themes to make it to air. This Friday, the first filmed adaptation of The Sandman premieres on Netflix. In the 30-plus years it took to bring Gaiman’s vision to the screen, popular culture has totally transformed. Against the backdrop of the MCU and more mainstream offerings from DC, The Sandman still stands apart. The Sandman is, in the technical sense, a superhero story.

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.

Rose Walker is officially introduced in episode 7. She's a 21-year-old woman who recently lost her mom and is on a mission to find the brother she was separated ...

When they finally make it to the location where the mysterious foundation is, they discover that the place is a private care home for the elderly. If Dream were to kill the child, he’d be killing a member of his own family, which is considered an unforgivable offense. She’s a 21-year-old woman who recently lost her mom and is on a mission to find the brother she was separated from many years ago. In the last episode of the season, we find out that Desire of the Endless ( Mason Alexander Park) was the father of Unity’s child. Who are the mystery people, and how is Rose related to them? There were many shocking reveals in The Sandman, but finding out who Rose was related to definitely took the cake.

In the second episode of Netflix's adaptation of the Neil Gaiman comic, Dream meets Cain and Abel and learns where he's going to need to go to get all his ...

In the 90 years or so since she left England, Ethel has become an art thief, or perhaps just a fence, and has taken the time to learn all sorts of languages and get an amulet that can explode her enemies. Just keep one and reuse it, like that one open grave in L.A. that is recycled in every TV show and movie. Maybe the ruby is holding his brain’s development back in the same way it’s delaying his aging. • It’s an LOL that Cain and Abel, two characters that predate Jesus (both in Christian writing and because in Sandman lore, they’ve existed since the first time a one-celled organism killed another one), use crosses in their giant cemetery. Overall, the CGI has been getting in the way of how yucky The Sandman could be texturally. Much in the same way as he was trying to do to the Corinthian in episode one, Dream needs to do the Infinity War Snap on something to reabsorb it into himself. Speaking of that mother and son, we get more of a sense of what Ethel Cripps has been doing with her absurdly long life span. Dream needs to get his tools back, the ones Ethel Cripps stole when she escaped from Roderick Burgess. And to do that, he needs to get stronger by absorbing something he has created. Both Cain and Abel are legacy DC characters, having hosted horror comics from the ’50s to the ’80s. Neil Gaiman added them to his story as a little nod to the past, the same way that Jordan Peele cast Keith David in Nope. In The Sandman, Cain and Abel together represent the first story. They have to reenact that first murder over and over and over. You know the kind: An NPC needs three items, you run around the map getting them, then maybe you get a cool sword or something at the end. I wept for Gregory. If The Sandman were on Does the Dog Die?, the answer would be “yes.” Technically gargoyles aren’t dogs, sure, but then why does this one come when called and play fetch, huh?

As we watch a raven follow a horse-drawn carriage and then fly off to another, otherworldly realm, Morpheus — aka Dream, aka Lord of The Dreaming, aka King of ...

“I made this world once, Lucienne,” he says as the decrepit, giant doors to The Dreaming draw closed behind them. Elsewhere, The Corinthian — fresh from a kill in which the victim’s eyes have been gouged out — knows exactly what’s happened. One of them is a young London girl named Unity Kincaid; she’ll become important to the story later in the season. We later see that she has a son named Johnny, who’ll also figure into the story in a later episode. When Alex’s wheelchair accidentally rubs away some of the magical markings holding Dream captive, the prisoner is able to make a guard fall asleep, which leads to a series to events that ends with a vortex opening and Dream getting sucked into it. He winds up naked and trapped in a mystical sphere, conjured by a rich man named Roderick Burgess (Game of Thrones’ Charles Dance), who’s attempting to capture Dream’s sibling, Death, instead.

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 British actor made his screen acting debut in a 1996 miniseries adaptation of Gulliver's Travels and more recently starred on the Starz drama, Sweetbitter, ...

Look for his name in just about any article related to Batman. Most audiences might remember her best from 1996’s live-action 101 Dalmatians movie, Roland Emmerich’s epic period piece The Patriot, playing Julia McNamara in the Nip/Tuck cast, and the 2020 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space, with Nicolas Cage, to name a few. Playing Rose’s friend Lyta Hall, who is also mourning the death of her husband, is Razane Jammal, who last starred on a supernatural, Netflix-exclusive drama called Paranormal in 2020. As Biblical figure and world’s first murderer, Cain — who now loyally resides in the dream realm — we have Sanjeev Bhaskar, whose last time starring in a Neil Gaiman adaptation was on an episode Amazon Prime’s Good Omens in 2019. Sanjeev Bhaskar (Cain) Gwendoline Christie’s fellow former Game of Thrones cast member, Charles Dance, plays Dream’s accidental captor and scheming magician Roderick Burgess, which is far from the English, Emmy-nominated thespian’s first villain role. Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Death) As the ruler of Hell, Lucifer, we have Gwendoline Christie — which seems like an inspired choice considering her great performance as Captain Phasma in the Star Wars movies, although this devil is not inherently evil and even something of a charmer. The versatile performer (he has done everything from irreverent comedies like The Big Lebowski to period epics like Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven) previously worked with Netflix for his reunion with Anomalisa creator Charlie Kaufman on I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as well as the animated comedy, Big Mouth, and its spin-off, Human Resources. Gwendoline Christie (Lucifer) Tom Sturridge (Dream) It almost feels just as surreal as Neil Gaiman’s own seminal writing style to say that Netflix’s series adaptation of his popular comic, The Sandman is finally here after the story spent many, many years waiting for a screen adaptation.

Here, find Vogue's picks of the very best of TV and film to head to theaters for—or stream from the comfort of your sofa—this weekend.

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.

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.

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.

Netflix's 'The Sandman' is a best new show of 2022. It brings Neil Gaiman's 'unfilmable' graphic novel to the screen. DC Comics and HBO Max missed out.

Once he does this, he can restore the balance of dreams for humanity and rebuild both his world, known as “The Dreaming,” and ours. Whether or not “The Sandman” is allowed to run long enough that, like “The Crown” and “Stranger Things,” it becomes a cultural juggernaut remains to be seen. Netflix’s snatching up of “The Sandman” from DC Comics does sever the series from Batman, Green Lantern and other DC heroes. Netflix’s all-at-once release will sadly work against the show, especially with “House of the Dragon” and “Lord of the Rings” poised to go head-to-head in the next month. DC Comics initially released the first of Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics in 1989. As one of the most expensive properties Netflix picked up in 2019, “The Sandman” represents yet another pre-eminent release amid the backdrop of a very challenging year.

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.

Diehard fans of the dark fantasy comic book series by Neil Gaiman are already expressing their love of the Netflix adaptation on social media. With 10 full ...

Lucifer is almost like a spin-off of The Sandman, though decidedly different tonally. Based on the fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman, American Gods is a fascinating and unique show that aired for three seasons on Starz. The first season is basically perfection but your mileage may vary with seasons 2 and 3. A second season is also in the works. Neil Gaiman has a very distinct creative style, so the best thing you can do after finishing The Sandman is to go check out his other shows. The Sandman has finally started streaming on Netflix after decades of development and fans could not be happier.

We sure hope so. The next installment of the source material, 'Season of Mists,' is largely considered Neil Gaiman's finest work on the series.

The 10 episodes of Season One covered just 16 issues of Sandman's original 75-issue-run. Hopefully, now that the important concepts have been established, the creative team can go even nuttier with it. "We’ve got as many [seasons] as they’ll let us have," The Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg told NME at the show's premiere in London. "If enough viewers show up, we can go for quite a long while.

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.