The miracle of
The Sandman tv series is that it is not one hundred percent terrible. Neil Gaiman’s comic is not an action/adventure book, it’s a book-book, a story built on interwoven stories about storytelling. Its stories are mythic and intimate, taking place across all of creation real and imagined. They are well-told enough in their static images and scattered phrases that they have become beloved. And like any good dream they can seem precious and silly when you drag them into the light. The real danger of a
Sandman adaptation wasn’t that it would be turned into a police procedural (as I guess
Lucifer was?) or stripped for parts for a
Tales from the Crypt-style anthology, but that someone would try and do it all straight and poison the source. Actors playing ideas, standing still, taking deep breaths and uttering portentous gack. Occasional pauses for flat CGI spectacle. A once-living piece of art made dead.
There is plenty of that in this. It doesn’t help that the main character (already not prone to action, pitched as unsympathetic, supposedly resistant to change(*)) is played by an actor who looks like Owen Wilson-as-Derek Zoolander and who tries to sound as if everything out of his mouth hangs in a dark cloud. (Todd Klein is a great comic book letterer, but I don’t think people should go around vocalizing his fonts.) Gwendoline Christie’s Lucifer speaks so slowly you will feel eternity creeping by. A choice made for a captive audience. Huge chunks of comic book dialogue are read into the script. Characters lean into frame to recite background dialogue at each other then, check marked, lean back out.
(*)
Dream is practically hugging people by the end of the last episode. Don Draper can be captivating without being able to change for seven seasons, but the aloof and inhuman King of Dreams is going to be singing “Happy Birthday” to his co-workers before we ever meet the rest of his family.
But the tragedy of
The Sandman tv show is that it is very much a tv show.
There is a heavy application of connective tissue. Sequential stories that belonged together just because they were put together now have recurring cast members. The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook, doing Christian Slater doing Jack Nicholson) is in almost every episode (and somehow they still fail to do extreme close-ups of his eyes, perhaps because they look more goofy than menacing) as some binding Big Bad. There’s evident effort to find things for people to do to the extent the reassembled dream realm can feel like a workplace show. (A little Patton Oswalt goes a long way.) The denizens of Hal’s house are weirdly rendered as the alt-cast of
Friends, with the creepy spider women now Phoebe-style quirky. There are time-eating “We need a scene here” scenes. Dialogue and themes are repeated just enough to feel like forced reminders. Dream gets a go-to action pose: He bows and blows digital sand at the camera.
The show’s also bound together by a lack of visual ideas. Occasionally they’ll recreate a specific image from the comics, but most of that level of allegiance is spent toward character design. There are a couple early aggressive travelling shots following ravens about, thankfully abandoned. Okay-enough flashes of black limbo stuff with the fates and during the battle in hell. There's a great, natural idea to show Rose Walker going from dream to dream, but none of the dreams have a smidge of the individual attitudes Mike Dringenberg, Sam Kieth & co. brought to them in the comics. Every digital fantasy backdrop looks like a digital fantasy backdrop. It’s mystifyingly shown in widescreen, and they refuse to do closeups of phone texts, as if this were meant to be seen in a theater. But it’s all very 21st-century fantasy television.
(Time spent in dreams doesn't often feel dream-like, more straight memory or fantasy. Which of course is not unusual. Gaiman tried a lot of ways of approaching dreams in the books and was most convincing when the images and text felt like an excited pile-on of ideas. One nice touch in the show: Characters personifying dreams tend to avoid answering direct questions. As dreams do. IIRC, Rose Walker starts doing this toward the end as well.)
It backs off a bit as the show goes on, but David Buckley’s score is heavy-handed, constant, and chintzy. Like the flat synth-as-orchestra faux-epic stuff they ply on Asylum blockbuster knock-offs. Some relief I suppose from all the Netflix series that feature non-stop high-profile songs. (There are some Corinthian-related on-the-nose soundtrack selections late in the run.) But it is an insecure application of music.
The
veteran tv and
veteran comic book adaptation guys behind the show have, with Gaiman’s blessing, made some smart patches and workarounds. Ethel Cripps is a pretty brilliant way to cut off one attachment to the DC Universe and grow another connection within the show. Brute and Glob have much more depth as Gault. Marrying two treasured stand-alone stories makes total sense, as does staging “24/7” as a
Twilight Zone episode from hell. (Though paring Dee to a single-issue grievance makes his villainy issue-oriented and wan; he’s more terrifying before he ever gets to the diner, exhausted after it.)
They abandon the voice-over as soon as they can. They add some motivation to characters who may or may not need it. They add agency wherever they can. To the benefit of Jed Walker, to the detriment of Lyta Hall. (Their Hall character is a disaster.)
As splattery and gougey as things get, they soften a lot of the horror elements – again, to the benefit of Jed Walker – avoiding a tonal shift with later volumes/seasons. The first two books are bound as quests-for-three. But the showrunners pass over the chance to mirror “24/7” with a stand-alone cereal convention episode so they can tease the collectors in earlier and keep The Corinthian occupied. And anyway, by that time they’re already drowning in the mess they’ve made of
The Doll’s House. That they’re better at the awkward, more basic first book doesn’t bode well going forward as things accumulate.
Though to be fair, that second book is built around a big swirling mess of ??? that takes up too much import to be mere MacGuffin. The show openly mocks it; Dream goes all “Uhhhhh” whenever anyone asks him about the reason for the vortex, Gilbert gets a chance to pontificate about it and tie it back into one of the themes they keep hammering at, and Rose equates the idea of the vortex with Barbie’s dream-prop Porpentine. The last-minute substitution of Unity, even if made logical, always felt like a cheap out. The series finds a practical use in that: Unity uses the moment (which I don’t think happens in the comics, could be wrong) to reveal that her rapist is Desire. It’s better than Dream just sniffing that out.
And while I take issue with the show trying to squeeze in every line from the book, I also object when it leaves out my favorites. Like the “Nice place.” “Yeah, it was a friend of mine.” exchange
Going forward. If that happens. There are reasons to watch, to keep watching. The stories are good ones. It is at least interesting to figure out why the re-telling of a good story does or does not work. As a fan there’s simple joy in seeing something you love played out in whatever form it may take. Goldie (adorable) and Martin Tenbones and Merv Pumpkinhead. Just thinking about Hob Gadling has always made me tear up. I’m easy there; I’m a sap. And the show’s good at bringing in welcome guests.
David Thewlis is better than this deserved. Though they cut Dee’s best line, too.
“Neat.”
I like Kirby Howell-Baptiste plenty, though I wish she’d leaned into her Mary Poppins joke harder. Vanesu Samunyai/Kyo Ra may be a rookie saddled with a sketch of a key character, but she smiles with her whole face and that’s one definition of pure win. Jenna Coleman is a bloody bad fit and I don’t think we need a Constan-tyne spin-off but I have residual Clara Oswald goodwill to spend. If you’re casting a show-stopping female impersonator and the man who created Hedwig is willing to make a scene or two you let him. And I had not seen that Stephen Fry was going to be Gilbert and squee’d when he turned up.
I have to look forward because the cost of fan-servicing is servitude and I pay my tributes. But all I ever wanted were the old books I already have on my shelf(*) and maybe the best thing about the
Sandman tv show is that it’s thorough and capable enough that, if it fails, no one should feel tempted to try it again.
(*) In a box, in storage. Considering it a liminal space.