How (and Why) Neil Gaiman Finally Adapted ‘The Sandman’ for TV
variety.com
variety.com
If you're not a Sandman stan, my advice is to watch episode 1, and then episode 5, skipping 2-4. The first actually-good episode is 6; the Hob Gadling stuff is sort of emblematic of the the comic grows into, so if you like it, you'll like the rest of it.
If you are a Sandman stan, something to note is that they seem to have deliberately severed it from the DC Universe. I'm surprised at how many elements of the first and second book turn out to be been DC tie-ins; for instance, Hector and Lyta Hall in Dolls House were I guess defined by other DC comics? Anyways, they've gone out of their way to cut all that stuff out the series.
I think most of the changes are for the better.
I think the series is fine.
I was way, way into Sandman when I was younger.
This show isn't in my Top N list. I'm curious to see if it gets renewed.
By comparison, the HBO Watchmen series is not only one of the best comic book adaptations of all time, but also one of my favorite TV series of the last 10 years.
My only two gripes are a bad 2.0 sound mix - too much dynamic range, even with compression turned on - and Lucifer was lackluster. Too much “corporate CEO” and not enough fallen angel. Should have pulled in the TV show actor.
But Death, Desire, Matthew, Lucien, even Morpheus himself all rock.
More importantly she doesn’t recognize Morpheus despite working with him.
After reading the first book, it was such a "meh" experience I didn't bother reading any others. Some occult guy traps the dream guy in a glass pot, dream guy escapes and wanders around getting his stuff back, also, his sister is a hot goth chick who happens to be the grim reaper. Later I understood it was peppered with references to other cartoon books, but that eluded me at the time.
Not sure what I'm missing but I just don't get the appeal.
I had the first book at home borrowed from a friend, read it once and thought "hm..". Then reread just like that and thought "hey, this is actually good". Then a third time and thought this was actually genius. Then decided to buy the whole serie.
It took me that long to understand the depth of the text, all the references ( either grabbed from other stories, or from real history), and sometimes realizing all the bits of the story.
And the best part to me: this is exactly reflecting the structure of a dream. It's all a bit weird and blurry, then its deep meaning only appears after careful examination.
We watched 1-5 last night and will likely watch 6-10 tonight.
5 was AMAZING. What tension, what dread. All of them are shot brilliantly, with fantastic acting and excellent dialogue.
That's funny since I found it formulaic to the extreme, which is a shame. Being a fan of the comics, I was saddened by the potential that was squandered in this adaptation. Regardless of what Gaiman says, I can't see this series as anything else than yet another cookie-cutter commoditized dumbed-down corporate-approved offering designed for mass-consumption.
It's more of the same mind-numbingly "safe" and soulless material that Netflix is so good at.
At least Alan Moore had the courage to tell Hollywood where to go.
There is none of that in this adaptation. It plays it safe on every possible level. One can easily imagine the corporate bean counters slapping Gaiman on the back, a firm nod of approval.
“Formulaic” feel like it lives in a similar bucket. They’re kissing cousins, at least.
In my experience of the dozens of books I’ve read which have had movies made of them there are only two in which the book is good and the movie is better or even as good as the book - “The Shining” and “The Godfather”. I find it’s a very rare and hard thing to do.
Adaptations aren't necessarily worse though. The Martian is better than the book. The yesteryear Dune is better than the book (I don't really like the book tho). Altered Carbon is a draw on the first season, but quickly outshines the book sequels later.
And in the case of The Hunt for Red October I like the movie better than the book.
The work was progressive for its time; today its ideals have been captured by managerialism.
> "Our predecessors were so wrong! Of course your otherness is worth celebrating! It's so much easier to extract value from your labor that way!"
I can totally see that they would have stood out more as something new in the 80's. Going back and reading some of my favourite comics from the 80's is bittersweet - seminal stories like the X-Men Dark Phoenix saga or Days of Future Past are marred by extremely annoying and intrusive exposition (I like exposition in books, and when well done it's great in comics too, but 1980's Marvel and DC exposition was so in your face most of the time), and Sandman work much better today than they do (other examples that stands out in retrospect in that way is Watchmen and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run).
But unlike, e.g. Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run which still stands out to me as outstanding by modern standards too, while I can see many things that'd make it stand out in the 1980's, and while it's still quirky, it didn't quite reach that level to me (admittedly, it's an extremely high bar, so to reiterate: I did like Sandman).
I can absolutely see myself having a very different view of it if I read it back then, though. Put another way: If I came to X-Men's Dark Phoenix or Days of Future Past story lines today because someone raved about it, and I wasn't used to the comics of the era, I'd have a very hard time seeing past the veneer of heavy-handed story-telling, but I remember them, and so I find it a lot easier to see through how dated they are, even though their execution is worse by modern standards.
still watchable, weirdly enough, but just not good.
^ No offense to the great Patton Oswald, but the audio is boosted to make the choice seem even worse. He's supposed to be a voice for the Sandman, but instead he's a bullhorn.
It was going well, until Mathew opened his mouth and spoke - and all I could think of was... "Happy!"... Another graphic novel adaptation where Patton Oswald did voice acting... But that character worked with his voice, this... does not.
The guy playing John Dee is David Thewlis, one of the best cinema actors of all time.
Matthew the Raven is not well handled (he's not well-handled in the book either!), and his dialog is unearned and superficial. "Dreams don't die" is the Goonies wishing well speech repurposed. I groaned audibly.
Episodes 2-4 were interesting as a fan of the books (though not of Preludes & Nocturnes, the weak first book), but if I weren't one of those, I'd have been happier skipping them. Episode 5 is good; episode 6 is unimpeachable.
He's Lupin in Harry Potters, for a quick reference (for others). I take it you've seen The Landscapers? Exceptional performances from both Thewlis and Olivia Colman. I came to Sandman as an adult, and I was not a comic reader as a child. Maybe that's why I love it, not having the fluency to recognize the uneven writing and things you listed as weakness? I remember being absolutely floored when I read the first few, and also being convinced it could never be successfully adapted. I thought there were so many nuances, so many allusions to myths and folklore woven into Gaiman's writing that a film adaptation would absolutely butcher the original material by its inability to render all the shades; (e.g. the Cain and Abel sub-story is played for laughs and misses the sinister undercurrent - it is after all a story about a man murdering his kin and lying about it to God).
So far I'm pleasantly surprised by the series. I thought the casting and costuming of Morpheus dead-on. In the book he's drawn as a tall and pale Gothic priest. I appreciate that the production design tried to keep close to the visual framing in the book, I look at each frame and I could see the original in the derivative.
I'm worried that the complexities of the books and its branching anthologies, after the world-building phase is done, will be reduced to stupid modern clichés, e.g. "when dream dies humanity would die" and similar treacle. For example how are you going to make sense of the story where Dream meets his friends every 100 years for a drink at an eternal tavern, I forget who was there, Newton and Pascal? That's not an episode to view but a novella or in its best form, a 20-page comic.
I could read the book at my own pace but I have to wait for the pace of the show when watching the TV adaptation. Like trying to swim upstream through mud. I understand that they needed to start with this, but "scrawny naked male protagonist being sullenly mute while locked in a bottle and narrating" is... not great.
The setting is less creative/weird than the comic (a night club in the original), a demon character is gone (probably to simplify the story), and the battle is shortened from the comic books while, simultaneously, stretched with a pep talk from Morpheus' raven that's only there to add drama.
I accept that maybe the episode is better due to these changes - as I said, haven't seen it yet and I could very well be wrong. But when I saw the trailer I got the exact same impression than the OP: formulaic, conventional, and dumbed down.
I feel that Sandman makes such good use of the medium that it may very well be impossible to faithfully adapt to live action. And maybe this is the best version anyone could realistically make. I just wish someone would once in a while say "let's keep this exactly as weird and nonsensical as it was in the original".
Later
Also, can we as adults with the books in far in the rear-view mirror (I mean, for those of us who'd say that) all not agree that the demon "contest" in the original books is cringey and deus ex machina? What the fuck is an "anti-life"?
I was actually surprised they didn’t changed it even further considering how it conflicts with Fox/Netflix’s Lucifer which according to the blogosphere departs quite a bit from the source material but it was quite a fun show, and despite things getting a bit old at some point especially when it moved away from its monster of the week format it’s clear that the entire production and cast loved working on it which is why it constantly got extended.
That's the understatement of the century :) "Lucifer" was a fun show to watch but it has NOTHING to do with the comic books except that it reuses few main character names, and the fact that Lucifer runs a bar/club in LA. It was created by Tom Kapinos, the same guy who made "Californication", and is one part that, one part "Analyze This", and one part "Miami Vice".
But it wasn't, it was about the anti-life equation, a reference to DC's Darkseid.
I don't believe the battle is much shorter (having recently re-read the comics), but I agree the pep talk from Matthew was unnecessary.
It's well very well-traveled ground. This formula isn't popular. The Walking Dead-themed shows are known for it.
Movies are less susceptible to being described as formulaic, but an iconic movie, The Big Lebowski, could reasonably be summarized this way (albeit the series is serialized into one piece). Coffee and Cigarettes doesn’t satisfy the “nobodies” in the literal sense, but it’s almost entirely this formula.
I’m just citing examples I can think of, I haven’t watched most of what people have watched. And I don’t mean in any way to dismiss the actual work, or the concept, or your finding novelty in it. It’s a really cool device for storytelling, but it’s definitely not a unique device.
None of which is to say that this is unique. It just isn't what I would call formulaic.
Except he didn’t, he sold the rights to a lot of his stuff, saying it was “money for old rope”.
all that said I like to imagine Neil Gaiman asked why he finally adapted The Sandman would snort like Frito in Idiocracy and reply I like money.
Of course, this is HN, where there's always SOMEONE who needs to be contrarian, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
What are you trying to say? Good not great?
Twitter is abuzz with insiders stating that the CEO doesn't like the cost or margins of "appointment viewing" and would prefer Discovery+'s more inexpensive, reality-based "comfort viewing".
It sounds like HBO is going to start sucking.
Felt like the Hobbit - if you cut off 2/3 of it it may be a great movie but as it is it's a bore.
As someone who only read a bunch of those 80s/90s "transgressive" comic books in the late 2000s-early 2010s, thanks to the wonders of the Web (and never saw any sign of anyone else having heard of these particular works in my godforsaken corner of the world, though Gaiman is somewhat known for his collabs with Pratchett), I could draw comparison with "Preacher" and "The Boys" (based on the eponymous works by Garth Ennis), which seem to be doing the whole "comic book to TV show because we bought off all the counterculture and are consequently running out of interesting intellectual property" thing a bit better. Taking more liberties with the source material, too; adding stuff that wasn't in the book but bears the original spirit.
Interestingly enough, those are also more grittier and less "politically correct" tales - even though their protagonists also tend to espouse enlightened views of radical acceptance, and the underlying message seems to be that the real antagonist is not just some entrenched establishment of crooked power mongers, but the mass of NPCs who enable them. Guess violence is timeless and magical realism is only relevant in the context of specific historical moments of cultural transition - who would've known?
Of course, there's comparatively less of that particular conflict overtly represented in the Sandman - it's one of those metaphysical things where most of the action happens in the characters' inner worlds. (Maybe that's why they thought it was such a timeless tale that recasting some of the characters as non-Gothic would be sufficient modernization?) Still, I consider Gaiman's work part of the same campaign of guerilla cultural warfare that was conducted around the turn of the century by teaching the kids lateral thinking, imagination, and of course emotional literacy and compassion. And of course the kids took that and went to become salaried creatives building nostalgic simulacra to mask the terminal disenchantment of the world (no enchantment -> no hope -> workers don't breed). So, yeah, guess we lost that one.
Finally got around to reading William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, and boy oh boy does the man have a good handle on how the media machine acts to transform artworks and the human experiences that art glorifies into a uniform bland "concept soup". Guess they'll start shooting shows from his desiccated corpus next. (Heard it here first, folks!)
All in all a Constantine/Watchmen tier adaptation. Don't waste time watching it, just torrent the original comic books and enjoy.
EDIT: If you do want to support badass comics, you could subscribe to the Patreon of Abaddon (author of https://killsixbilliondemons.com/).
Episode 6 on the other hand was the highlight of the season as it completely stuck to the source material. Death now being black still felt completely natural, since her personality was the same, and the Endless are not bound to any form.
I'm fine with changes made to adapt a work to a new medium, but changes without any reason just confuse me as a fan of the original work, as I'm subconsciously expecting a reason for the change that never comes
This. Exactly! Jenna Coleman plays Joanna Constantine in Netflix’s Sandman. I really disliked her in Dr.Who because it became the Clara Oswald Show…
I couldn’t bear to watch her repeat the same shtick in Sandman too.
Sandman is in my opinion Gaiman's best long form work, but for my money his best single issue is probably from his (likely now never to be finished although they do keep teasing, most recently for this October) Miracleman run.
"Winter's Tale" from the Golden Age of Miracleman is doing something comic books aren't allowed to do, even more so than when he wrote Sandman. Winter is far more powerful than her father, and so the story ought to not work because what are the stakes? Introducing some "big bad" that could hurt Winter ruins the flow of the rest of the comic, and yet without such a threat why should we care about her tale? Gaiman sidesteps that by telling it as a children's story, like Judth Kerr's "The Tiger Who Came To Tea". In this form the story within a story can break all the rules. Masterful. And then the outer envelope story continues the Golden Age theme of humans living in a utopia still being humans.
I like graphic novels ("1602" was excellent!) but when I started to look through Gaiman's catalog for new stuff to read, "The Sandman" seemed a bit epic and not as easily digestable as novels and short stories.
A little research revealed I was certainly confused. The Sandman I had in mind was the original Sandman, Wesley Dodds, a novel creation of Gardner Fox (writer) and Bert Christman (artist) for DC comics, and who's popularity languished in the 1940's, but must have come back into style for (I can find no reference to but have seen) the 1980's graphic novel, large format, grey cover featuring Dodds as the Sandman.
The dip in popularity in the 1940's led other creators to steal the name and ideas and use for other unrelated comic characters. But then those characters have been forgotten and Dodds returns, only for Gaiman (also for DC) to capitalize on the popularity of the original Sandman (Dodds) just a few years later by creating the god Sandman (Morpheus), and retconning Wesley Dodds as being given his powers by Morpheus.
Science fiction has always been a pioneering genre for fairly representing minorities. But Gaiman turned everything goth, maybe a little steampunk, and gratuitously gay. I don't think there is anything wrong with giving a little of this and a little of that for the various groups of viewers and consumers, especially minorities, but, with a ham fist, Gaiman overindulges, belabors and vastly over-represents alternative lifestyles, who happen to all be white but for a single exception, a black woman. No Finns, no Danes, no Pols, no Hindus, no Japanese, no Filipinos... mostly just gay white male characters, and a couple few black men and women.
I don't like to criticize a work in this way, because it is not all that matters, but I am nearly certain that Gaiman intended to shock, and I expect wants discussion on it. My feelings are that gay and lesbian characters were avant garde in the late 1960s, but now they're used kind of like too much ketchup. Everything is drowning in ketchup.
Have you read the comic? It’s very, very goth and steampunk.
As for “there are only gay blank women” point… what? There are like three black women in the show for more than an episode or two that I can think of.
The main character is a god played by a white guy, the main antagonist is a non-human nightmare played by a white guy, the secondary antagonist (ruby guy) is a white guy, his mom is a notedly straight white woman, Constantine is a write woman, Lucifer is a white woman, and while Stephen Fry may be gay in real life, his character doesn’t really have a sexuality.
Aside from Rose Walker, the majority of people that move the story forward are white folks.
The point I made was any minority representation on television is good. Art should reflect life. Unless it is a cultural work, which The Sandman is not, vastly over-representing a minority, and one that is already recognized as over-represented in the industry, is obsessive and indulgent. If it was essential to the story, that is one thing, but almost none of it had anything to do with the story or its advancement. It is gauche wallpaper. It is gratuitous. The homosexuality of the characters doesn't matter. It could be remade entirely with only straight characters, and it would still be sexually gratuitous and indulgent.
Dreams are inherently sexual, but this fact is entirely lost on Gaiman.
To me, that's a really weird statement.
Perhaps it's more a reflection of how you dream?
[1] https://ew.com/tv/neil-gaiman-defends-the-sandman-casting-no...
In the comic book you can just draw a goth chick, and a million women say "That's me" and you move on. But if you actually cast any of the women who'd like to think that's them it's not going to make anybody happy. She ceases to be "Everyman" well, every-goth-chick and becomes a specific individual.
So I think you probably specifically don't want to cast Death for resemblance to that image, much more than his other siblings. Actually I'd be tempted to cast Brad Pitt, and be like yeah what? But Brad is a bit old and a bit expensive, and that involves rewriting some stuff, so, sure, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, why not? Personally I think Brad's accent would have thrown me off more than Kirby not having pasty white skin.
I thought the original author's intention was to have a young and indefatigable character play the embodiment of the end of all things as a light irony and existential cotton candy balance to the grim reality of the job.
But I'll hold my real opinion until I see the whole show.
If I don't hear a bubbly "Peachy-keen!" I'll probably just sigh and roll my eyes. It's only TV. If I want the old thing I'll just reread the comics again.
I was pleasantly surprised by that; there's a (somewhat well-regarded) audiobook adaptation of the books, with James McAvoy as Morpheus and Kat Dennings (the older daughter in 40 Year Old Virgin, and, by appearances, a straight-out-of-central-casting choice for Death), and Death does not work at all in it.
Lucifer... sure, he's canonically without genitals anyway and decidedly uninterested in things like gender norms - and I'm actually excited to see Gwendolyn Christie portray the character.
Casting a black woman as Death goes directly against Gaiman's explicitly stated concept of how he imagined the character, and while she wears many guises, it seems wrong to just break the visual similarity (paleness) between the Endless. I really, really hope the actress can transport the character's essence (IMO first and foremost a kind of universial compassion and humor) sufficiently to make it not matter.
And then Lucien as a black woman... was that really necessary? At some point it just feels forced.
The rest have done really well, even Death (who I didn’t get good vibes from in the lead up).
EDIT: Despair didn’t do much for me either. More emo teen than avatar of suffering.
Someone then complained about disrespecting the artist and the model, and the artist responded he loved it too (the model has passed, but the artist, who was a close friend, said she would have loved it as well).
I did watch that clip from The Sound of Her Wings, and I thought she nailed the kindness aspect of Death. I do hope we'll also get some of fun, hopeful aspects too, but I haven't got t othose episodes yet.