Netflix’s The Sandman is a great ad for the Sandman comics
Television in the streaming era is a beast with a voracious appetite. It must constantly be fed entire series, seasons, cinematic universes all at once, merely to be sated for a weekend. The need to attract subscribers is paramount, and there are only so many stories in the world to tell them. Fueled by this business-oriented need to reduce art to chum — or content, as it’s called now — adaptations of beloved works in other media have been made at a dizzying rate of late, as projects that previously languished in development hell have suddenly found all hurdles removed from their path.
The Sandman — the acclaimed 1989-1996 comic book series created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg — was one of those projects. Largely considered unfilmable thanks to its serial nature and surreal visuals as lovingly depicted by a bevy of artists who would carry the story of Dream forward after Kieth and Dringenberg departed the series, a screen adaptation constantly failed to materialize despite many efforts beginning in the 1990s. Decades later, The Sandman has finally been translated to flesh and blood as a Netflix series developed by Gaiman himself alongside David S. Goyer (Batman Begins) and Allan Heinberg (The O.C., among other things). Its arrival immediately presents two questions: Did the cynical need for content grist bring it here as a shell of what it could have been? And will it prove those who hold the comic, a singular work of the medium, as “unadaptable” correct?
The good news is simple: They pulled it off. Netflix’s The Sandman is perhaps the best imaginable TV version of the comic book. The series is faithful to the source material on a Peter Jacksonian level while also making some needed compromises for
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