‘The Sandman’ review: Finally, we enter The Dreaming

For literature and especially comic book nerds of my generation (let’s say…middle-aged now), Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman was essential reading alongside “literary” comics or the emerging term “graphic novel/graphic literature” besides work like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.

The Sandman‘s grandiose world-building, matched with its deft character work and its ability to bring disparate mythologies together made for an exhilarated read. It mashed religious pantheons together before it was cool. And it just as effortlessly featured DC characters as it slid in issues that featured William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. 

This rather long-winded intro, more than signaling and warning that I am a fan of the comics, should serve also to say that I am thinking about the Netflix series adaptation of The Sandman in two ways: one, as a fresh, never-heard-of-it kind of thing, and the other, as a longtime fan, who has always wondered what an adaptation could look like (And could it even be good/live up to the original?).

First up, if you’re coming into The Sandman fresh, maybe you’ve heard of the comics, maybe this just popped up on your feeds. My suggestion is just to dive in. While you might file this under “fantasy” or “horror” alongside other shows, I assure you this is something wholly different. Even in just its first season of 10 episodes, you get this impressive sweep of stories and tones. If nothing else, The Sandman is a story about stories, about storytelling, the power of imagination, and, of course, dreams. 

What we are provided here in these first 10 episodes is an invitation then, our entryway into this tremendous world. We are introduced to Morpheus, King of the Dreaming. Tom Sturridge manages to be convincing as the tens of thousands-year-old anthropomorphic representation of dreams. Sure, he kind of still looks like a Goth dude from the ’90s (or for more recent cultural touchstones, pale enough to join the Twilight crew), but his performance brings a gravitas that makes us take the show and its totally fantastic events seriously. 

Very quickly in the first episode, we watch as Morpheus/Dream is captured and imprisoned. This has catastrophic effect on both the waking world and The Dreaming, and so we spend a lot of the season with Dream as he attempts to regain his power and restore order to both. Overall, there’s a nice quest-like feel to the season, as well as in individual episodes. You feel that the series is propulsive and it’s taking you places. In fact, it takes you to so many places, real and imagined, that it’s just a celebration of creativity. 

At the same time, there are episodes that will pull back, slow down, and work on character. You get to sit and spend time with characters, deepening our understanding of them amid the large, complex world that’s being built around them. 

That is the exciting part of this for me. We have this unique fantasy world that we get to live in, shuttling between dreams and waking world, and the soft spaces between them. And in this opening season, we get the building blocks of the even larger interconnected worlds and mythologies that we will (hopefully) get in succeeding seasons. 

Meanwhile, we are introduced to characters who might be around for an episode or two, but have such profound impact on the story. For example, there’s comics fan favorite Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), whose screen time is pretty limited here, but who has great impact as a character as well as on the way we think of the overall story. Same goes with Jenna Coleman’s Johanna Constantine, or small players like Cain and Abel, or Gwendoline Christie’s Lucifer, or David Thewlis’ Doctor Dee, or…well, I could just keep going here. At the same time, by the end of this season, I think people will have a real affinity for characters like Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong) and especially Matthew the Raven, voiced by Patton Oswalt. 

This is all to say the show kind of has a little bit of everything I like about good TV. You’ve got a great overarching story, and you’ve got great individual episodes that build out both that big story but also the world you inhabit. You have great performances from actors that give us compelling characters. 

In an interview, Neil Gaiman said that their approach to adaptation was taking what already worked from the comics and then figuring out how it would work for this medium. And I think they’ve done that brilliantly. 

Now, if you’re a longtime fan, then obviously you’ve been watching the casting announcements – and oh boy, do people have some really strong opinions. If you have embraced the progressive elements that the comics brought forward (they were a product of their time of course, but within that time they were progressive), then you’ll see that the updates and changes are in the same spirit that the comics had. Gaiman has been dealing with all kinds of online hassling by fans who demand this show be a certain way. If you are open to the changes, then I think you will love this show. 

I think as a fan, again, if you loved comics, you loved how they gave you different kinds of stories. And you’ll get all that here. I think that this comes at the perfect time, really. Because the technology exists to bring this to us. The show is perfectly cast. And there’s also an element of theatricality here that enables this to feel truly fantastic. 

Watching certain issues, even certain images, brought from comics to film can be exhilarating. Its effect on me was a kind of awe, seeing something I was familiar with – pretty much expecting – but seeing it brought to this medium and imagined so fully. I got screeners about a week and a half ahead of the official release, and I’ve been through all the episodes twice because I feel there are so many things to appreciate about the series. 

So, this is a resounding must-watch, I think, whether you’re new to the series or a fan who wants to experience this story in a new way. The comics and the series can coexist (as have a lot of the radio/audio adaptations), and each medium can be enjoyed on its own, each adding to the overall experience of the world that’s been created. – Rappler.com