Enter Sandman

 

Long and short of it:

If you've read the comics, skip the series as it's a bad adaptation that adds very little.

If you haven't read the comics, this is probably the best television all year because you've never seen writing like this. Watch it.

Spoilers and many thoughts below the cut:

If you've seen it, you know the writers so far are going for about 2 trade paperback arcs a season, and about 2 comic issues an episode. So we have 5 episodes of Preludes and Nocturnes, 1 episode of Sound of Her Wings/Hobb Gadling, and then 4 episodes of Doll's House. At this rate they could wind up the whole series in 4 seasons (if they don't do many of the standalone short story collections, and The Wake is only 1 episode), or drag it out 6 or 7 seasons if they want.

Anyway, this means that smack dab in the middle of the season they have nearly an entire episode of "John Dee driving 7 people we've never met before insane in a diner" (who will die and not be in a future episode), followed by an entire episode of "two gods discuss the nature of their duties as they walk around delivering souls to the afterlife, and then those two gods make a bet with one human about living forever." Plots are mostly not advanced. Character arcs are not advanced outside the two gods and one immortal human (who does not stick around, for now.) They are almost entirely self-contained, completely weird stories, about very gothic and non-grounded concepts.

Most Netflix-like series are jam-packed full of pacing that all of the time needs to be advancing the plot OR advancing the character arcs of the 5-7 person main cast. Even doing solely this, tends to drag out shows that often feel like they should have been a 2 hour movie. (The recent Wheel of Time series is an excellent example of a show that feels it needed to include every major character arc and plot explanation leading to a slow paced, bloated first season with no real moment of catharsis.) It is unheard of for a modern show to just focus on a cool moment that is otherwise cuttable, especially for one or two episodes. The closest I can think of is... shows where Carrie Coon goes to a hotel by herself for an episode and discovers the nature of anomie (Fargo S3, Leftovers S1.)

(There are, of course, anthology shows where every episode is a short story like this. That's not the same obviously, especially because of the lack of shared universe/cosmology like here.)

So, to explain my above recommendations, is this a good translation of the famous comic? No, most of the acting is wooden, the sets/CGI often look cheesy and fake, a great deal of the 80's grimeyness that grounded the comic has been lost, and Morpheus's portrayal in particular (as someone else quipped) "manages to be 7 out of the 10 necessary things he needs to be" which is not enough.

But by Death, you are not going to get bold writing like this in any other show you can find, if you've not already seen it in the comic before. The fan service money shots of particularly poetic lines from the comics ("What power do dreams have in Hell?" "You're not very bright." "Dumbest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification." "Was I that careless?" "I've been told it's impolite to keep one's friends waiting.") are all faithfully carried over, delivered with only 1/3 the smooth timing as in the comics, but are still really good and provocative if you aren't already expecting them.

The idea of the Endless and their universe, if you haven't already been used to them for 30 years, is really great! Better world-building than another chosen-one fantasy war.

Plus, Gaiman being around to help with the reconstructing of the plot, makes the warped choices they have to make to make it all work... actually work pretty well? The best example is the time Dream spent in prison. The show keeps that he was imprisoned around 1918 (because the World War I insanity of it is inescapable as context), and decides to tell a modern-setting story, so it happens in 2022 not 1988... which means that Dream was imprisoned for over 100 years, not merely 70ish as in the comics. This unfortunately makes several of the characters (Alex Burgess, Unity Kinkaid, John Dee) well over 100 years old, and they seem rather spry for that, but it can be forgiven (especially if you hand wave proximity to magic slows aging.)

But here's an interesting thing. In the comics, Dream meets a man named Hobb Gadling starting in 1389, every hundred years in the same bar, to see if he has gotten tired of life yet. In 1889 they fight over whether they are "friends", and Hobb declares that if Morpheus is there in 1989 then that means they are friends. And Morpheus decides to show up in 1989, there's charming sentimental friendship, etc.

The show keeps the centennial meetings on the 89th year. Which means... Dream is still imprisoned in 1989. And Hobb shows up, and sees no one, and becomes quite glum. And then they have an additional, new scene set in 2022 to resolve this. It's a bold fucking change, and one that works very well. (Of course, their one period piece glimpse of 1989 makes you wish the whole series had been set in these 80's.)

(At much greater length, the plot threads in Doll's House weave back and forth in very complicated and different ways... that actually make more sense in the show than the comic.)

***

All that being said, I'm just not sure if this is going to work in the end. Much online talk has been made of how Gaiman has changed the comic to be more politically current - a large number of characters who were white are now black, no one smokes cigarettes, John Constantine is Joanna Constantine (who is great as a more blatant mirror of Morpheus's own flaws, btw), and mortals more frequently call out how unjust this entire theological set up is. Yeah they're noticable, but largely they aren't a big deal. (The biggest deal is the absence - the two originally most working-class characters, Mathew the Raven and Merv the Pumpkin, are stunt casted by big stars, who are pretty atrocious and certainly destroy whatever "everyman" earthy aspect the character voices originally had.)

Except where will it go? Because here is the unavoidable outcome of the Sandman comics: Dream dies. He has to die, as Gaiman wrote very clearly in introductions to later comics. The long-running theme is that we either change to new times, or we die, and Dream can not change enough or leave. His fate is tragic and inevitable.

But the first season has dozen of examples of Dream's inferiors saying "hey boss stop being such an arrogant shit" and him reacting "oh, right, yes." And Morpheus developing into a good and likable person! It's not that the moral valence of "respecting other people's points of view and rights" is new to Gaiman, it's that the original Dream could not do this and that necessitated the endpoint of the series. If Dream goes around granting authority to Lucien(ne) and making nightmares into dreams and apologizing to Lyta, then how the the series end?

***

Endings are always hard.