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.

Netflix's The Sandman brings Dream and his Endless siblings to life in a way Neil Gaiman and longtime fans could only conjure up in their deepest of sleeps.

Underneath all the darkness, brooding and dark fantasy elements is a story about one of the most powerful creatures in existence learning how complicated, messy, cruel, loving, and selfless humans can be. Netflix’s The Sandman acts as a direct adaptation of the “Preludes & Nocturnes" and "The Doll's House" stories from Gaiman’s The Sandman graphic novel series and, outside of updating the time in which it takes place and a couple key changes here and there, it’s nearly a page-for-page take on the beloved stories. Some of our final moments in hell do showcase the only effect that looks out of place, but what a track record before then! Each one of them is wildly important to the success of the show, but not enough can be said about casting director Lucinda Syson’s work on the project. Armies of people brought The Sandman to life on the small screen. While it’s just about impossible to live up to the kind of expectations that come with such anticipation, Gaiman, Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer and the team behind the new Netflix series didn’t just meet them – they exceeded them.

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?

Well, the 10-episode Sandman series is here at last, following a 2019 deal that brought the property to Netflix, shepherded by executive producers Gaiman, David ...

Kirby Howell-Baptiste offers a wonderfully wise, serene twist on Death, who comforts the newly deceased and sends them on a path to the afterlife. The imagery complements storytelling that stays true to Gaiman’s sensibility—a mix of fantasy tropes, literary and pop-cultural references, gothy aesthetics, and archetypes grounded in global mythology that is as thoughtful in its own way about how people use the omnipotent heroes and villains we invent through fiction as Watchmen. At times, the show does seem too eager to make characters explain aspects of Dream’s journey toward a greater understanding of the human experience that are already apparent from the narrative. Dream is something of a straight man amid so much weirdness, but Sturridge possesses just the right combination of baby face and scowl. Whoever thought to cast Hedwig and the Angry Inch mastermind John Cameron Mitchell as a Florida boarding-house owner and drag cabaret singer deserves a bonus. There are great, warped concepts like this everywhere: a convention for serial killers, a Dream Realm Cain (Sanjeev Baskhar) who’s always murdering a self-resurrecting Abel (Asim Chaudhry), a man granted immortality in 1389 who meets up with Dream every hundred years for a beer and some reflections on why he still loves being alive. The Sandman production designer Gary Steele ( Outlander) wields visual effects so much more artfully. Because he’s descended into the waking world in pursuit of a “rogue nightmare,” a.k.a. the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), who’s entertaining himself by causing havoc among humans, Dream is the Endless they capture instead. In the first six episodes, which hew fairly closely to the first volume of the comics, Preludes and Nocturnes, the quest will take him back to Earth and, literally, past the gates of hell. The Sandman dates back to DC Comics’ 1930s Golden Age, but Gaiman’s version constituted a complete reinvention. He spends a torturous century in his prison, too proud to buy his freedom by acquiescing to the demands of his mortal captor (Charles Dance). From smart casting and strong writing to exquisitely eerie, noir-meets-horror production design that makes thoughtful use of digital effects, this is easily one of the best small-screen comic adaptations ever made. First it was supposed to be a movie.

Since 1991, when Neil Gaiman was first approached about turning his dark fantasy comic book series into a film, there have been at least three separate attempts ...

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

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Fans of the Neil Gaiman comic should find lots to love in Netflix's adaptation of The Sandman.

But he carries himself with a sort of ethereal aloofness that cuts to the core of the character, and it's not hard to buy him as a being that is not human but becomes more like one over the course of the story. There's no doubt that a so-far-unannounced second season could help deepen and enrich some characters that don't feel fully formed during the first go-round but still have large parts to play. Even if the rest of the series didn't work, Netflix's The Sandman would be worth it for these two hours, with the sixth episode in particular emotionally resonating at the impressive level the comic was often able to reach. One common complaint might be that the Rose Walker/Dream Vortex arc that closes out the season ends up being the show's weakest, and it's true those episodes suffer from some tonal inconsistencies as well as a few performances by actors who clearly aren't as seasoned as, say, Dance or Thewlis. There are also some roles that don't get enough screentime to be as effective as you might remember from the page. And while Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer seems like great casting in theory, the TV show version of the character never quite matches its devilishly charming comic-book counterpart. Other standouts of the large cast (some of whom only appear for an episode or two) include the perfectly cast Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death; David Thewlis as John Dee, an unwell man with dark ambitions who comes in possession of Dream's magical ruby dreamstone; and Ferdinand Kingsley as Hob Gadling, a human who is granted immortality by Death and, over the decades, develops a unique friendship with Dream. Those three end up serving as the focal points of Episodes 5 and 6 — two hours that serve as the undisputed highpoints of the season. And, fourth, a young woman named Rose Walker (Kyo Ra) has been identified as a Dream Vortex, a human who has the power to enter the dreams of others and impose her will upon The Dreaming. Netflix's The Sandman (which was produced by Warner Bros. Television with Heinberg as the showrunner and Gaiman heavily involved) is a faithful and loving adaptation of a comic that many hold dear, and the series is able to retain much of the source material's strengths without making any serious missteps that would cast a shadow over the whole enterprise. But the basic structure of the comic remains intact, with Dream's quests taking him to locations as exotic as Hell and as terrifying as Florida. To non-fans, this may all sound like a bunch of gibberish, and it's to the show's credit that it is able to translate the comic book's lyrical but sometimes labyrinthine story to the screen in a way that feels natural and welcoming. (Dream and Death are both part of the Endless, a "family" of beings representing a fundamental aspect of humanity.) The show states its epic intentions early with a first episode that covers more than a century of time, as a sleeping sickness plagues the world while Dream remains in captivity. The show starts as the comic does, with Morpheus becoming imprisoned by a mortal magician (Charles Dance) who was trying to capture Dream's sister, Death, and ended up with the wrong god in his basement. As far as precarious fantasy adaptations go, the end result is much closer on the spectrum to Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings than it is to, say, that misguided Dark Tower movie that came out a few years ago.

At the very beginning of the series, we meet Dream (Tom Sturridge), en route to capture a rogue nightmare (The Corinthian, played by Boyd Holbrook) when ill- ...

The biggest issue with the series as a whole is that certain subplots as presented aren’t quite fleshed out or connected enough to ‘fit’. It’s a long-running series, sure, so undoubtedly some aspects of the story will be fleshed out at a future date or have to otherwise be edited for the screen. The series excels in both worldbuilding and cinematography–it feels mightily close to the source material, with a grandeur, scale, and depth that are enjoyable to see. Certain connections could be clearer for the audience, however—we come to find out that Dream’s imprisonment, as well as a future challenge, has a more complex origin than we thought (to avoid spoilers). We find out who did it, but the series so far severely under-develops the why. It’s easily one of the best-looking series that Netflix has produced, with light, color, scale, depth… Bound for far too long, the waking world and the world of dreams suffer, nightmares are loose among us, and the dream realm starts to fall apart. The Endless: Death, Delirium, Desire, Despair, Destiny, Destruction, and Dream. Seven siblings, embodiments of the forces of nature, each with their own kingdoms and vast power.

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.”

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.

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.

The Sandman season 1, episode 1 on Netflix – easter eggs, comic book accuracy, and more.

In the 1926 sequences we see a couple of adverts for Kincaid Sugar on the newspaper that Alex is reading and the one that Jessamy sets fire to. The actual headline that day was the far less exciting LITTLE MIX LEIGH-ANNE ROBBED OF £40k RING. The other guard is reading a copy of IT by Stephen King. Dream is ultimately as much of a universal function and an observer of events as he is a traditional protagonist. This is an unusual start to a series, in many ways, focussing more on the impact of Morpheus's absence on our world and on Alex than on who Dream actually is – but that's just the nature of this story. There’s no mention of his dead son in the comics, where he’s manipulating those around him. Both Hathaway and Burgess have lost sons to conflict and the magicians aim to invoke Death in the hope of bringing them back to life (along with a few nice optional extras like wealth, power, immortality, that sort of thing). Instead, they end up with Death’s brother, Dream (Tom Sturridge). Unsure what to do with him, Burgess imprisons Morpheus in his mansion and leaves him to rot for the next several decades. We’re not going to fret about the slight name-changing or gender-swapping of some characters – honestly, why would you? We don’t see much of the Dreaming itself – there’s more of that in the next episode – but “Sleep of the Just” does a fine job of setting up the world(s) of the show, laying out numerous paths that we’ll follow over the next nine – often very odd! The rest of "Sleep of the Just" follows the effects of Dream's imprisonment on our world. Or so we thought, because here we are, with the first episode of Netflix’s much anticipated new show and not only is it pretty good, it's also very close to the comic that inspired it. He comes close to setting Morpheus free several times, but the fear of his dad stops him, even after Burgess eventually dies. Neil Gaiman's masterpiece – and the saga remains, for this reviewer's money, his finest work in any medium – is such a tangled knot of plot threads, stories within stories and allusions to literature, mythology, art, and other culture that it defies easy translation.

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.

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.

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 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.

In conversation with the prolific author, whose celebrated comic The Sandman has been adapted into an ambitious new Netflix series.

I worry terribly that if I went back in time, and said to him, “Hey, it’s gonna be alright, you’re going to do everything you wanted to in Sandman. Everybody at the end of the day will love it. At the end of the day, the people who will decide what the literature was of a period that actually matters, what speaks to them, what’s important—they’re hundreds of years away from here. From the age of 24 to 27, I was a film critic, and I saw a lot of bad films. She got me through the death of my parents, of my loved one, of my sibling, of my friend. And I couldn’t see the point in making bad films. When it’s my turn to go, there’d just be somebody lovely there, saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you should have looked both ways before crossing that street.” That was the Death that I wanted. So getting to a place where we’re given the money and the resources to make Sandman from the comics is unexpected and an absolute delight. How has that changed the world of comics? Though set against a backdrop of gods and their cosmic conflicts, it is (in the way of all good myths) a story deeply concerned with what it means to be human—our frailties, our failures, and the possibilities we envision when we close our eyes. Mostly going through the old comics reminded us all the extent to which Sandman had kind of been rather ahead of its time. Years ago, at one of his earliest opportunities to speak at a university, author Neil Gaiman was informed that the English department had elected to boycott the event. He wrote comics—and one couldn’t write comics and be a real writer.

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.

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.

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.