After decades of failed or blocked film adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Netflix has finally broken through with a new 10-episode series, released on Aug. 5. And it was all worth the wait. The Sandman is spectacular. 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. He escapes captivity and returns to his realm, The Dreaming, to rebuild and reorient himself, and that process leads to personal growth and deeper relationships with his subjects and his siblings. Allan Heinberg and David Goyer, working with an older, wiser, and now-TV veteran Gaiman, did just that. To understand exactly why the television adaptation excels so much, one must know what the comics did successfully and how the show used that to its advantage. The comics were full of iconic character designs, and those characters were often placed in fantastical situations that traditional television could not afford to render effectively or convincingly. The show clearly spent the money to render these situations well. There is exactly one moment in the entire series where the sets took me out of the moment (they reused an old one and didn’t do enough to change its appearance). Otherwise even the scenes that look like they just picked a random quarry to shoot in were done so with a later story beat in mind. The show captures the dream logic of Morpheus’ realm beautifully, with everything from Morpheus’s giant hand snatching a rice paddy intersection out of one person’s dream, to the unintelligible letters on road signs in another. As for capturing the iconic characters, the casting for this show is superlative. Tom Sturridge (Irma Vep) is stunning as Morpheus, the King of Dreams, and Boyd Holbrook (Logan) is his primary sort-of-antagonist of the show, the tooth-eyed escaped nightmare The Corinthian. Both Morpheus and The Corinthian are given more material, more interiority than their comics counterparts, and Sturridge and Holbrook do an incredible job conveying those emotions through serious restrictions: Holbrook has to act without his eyes, and Sturridge has the mopey goth vibe of Morpheus to maintain from the comics. That mopey goth vibe doesn’t end up being a restriction. What Sturridge does is turn expectations on their head: he gives a subtle, layered performance as Morpheus, with flashes of acting against type – every smirk, every grin, every eye twinkle he gives shines through. In fact, Sturridge’s performance is the place where the difference between the show and the comic is most stark. The supporting cast is every bit as outstanding as the leads. David Thewlis (Wonder Woman) is a creepy nightmare of a person as John Dee; Kirby Howell-Baptiste (The Good Place) is magnetically perfect as Dream’s sister Death; Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) quietly seethes as Lucifer Morningstar, Lord of Hell; and Stephen Fry (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) is a highlight of the back half of the show as Gilbert. But ultimately, The Sandman belongs to Sturridge, Holbrook, and the showrunner team. They deserve massive critical acclaim for their accomplishment. And a season 2 renewal as soon as possible.
