TV review: The Sandman on Netflix

Gwendoline Christie and Tom Sturridge in The Sandman

(Image credit: Netflix)

“The Sandman has long been perceived as the ultimate ‘unfilmable’ comic book,” said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. Neil Gaiman’s opus, which was published by DC Comics from 1989 to 1996, surfs a zigzag, “dreamlike logic”; its characters “hopscotch between timelines”; and its “sheer 80s goth glumness leaves no space for Marvel-type quips”. Yet these qualities have miraculously been preserved in Netflix’s “gripping” ten-part series, developed by Gaiman and David S. Goyer.

In a cast that is “the stuff of dreams”, Tom Sturridge plays the mooching Sandman himself, an immortal who rules over the realm of dreams until he is captured by wizard Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance). From there, the action “leaps all over the place – spanning time, dimensions and genre”; and the result, for the most part, “is as authentic an adaptation as might be reasonably expected. For Gaiman fans, it’s finally game on.”

The “mood lighting” and portentous tone can get wearying, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. But it’s “slick and extremely beautiful”, and once Jenna Coleman arrives it starts to feel a bit like Doctor Who, “but smarter”. I have not read the comics, but if it carries on in this vein, “I’m in”. I found the whole thing “underwhelming”, said Dan Einav in the FT. Subplots aren’t fleshed out properly, and dialogue is limited to functional statements in which characters bluntly state who they are and what they intend to do. Still, it is fitting that a show “about the ‘king of dreams’ seems so well equipped to send viewers to sleep.”