The Sandman

 I think I was first exposed to Neil Gaiman when my friend recommended American Gods. That novel is probably Gaiman's second-most-notable work, which imagines the imported deities from the arrival of so many cultures in America manifesting as tangible individuals with their own plans and agendas.

The American Gods TV series came with much excitement, but wound up getting lost in a mix of creative impulses. Bryan Fuller, creator of shows like Dead Like Me, Hannibal, and Pushing Daisies, took a lot of liberties with the source material that... arguably distracted from the actual plot of the novel, and notably Gaiman himself found the deviation too extreme. Fuller was fired, and the show underwent a re-tooling but lost much of its good will.

The Sandman, made by Netflix and based on what I would say is Gaiman's original claim to fame, the surreal, epic, and somewhat dizzying comic series from the late 1980s and early 1990s, is one of those projects that has been rumored for decades at this point (I remember a time when Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to play the eponymous anthropomorphic representation of dreams). Now, it's finally out.

Sandman's a weird story, though at least the first several issues, collected in the first trade paperback version (the entirety of which I read in college in the mid-2000s) focus on Dream (also known as Morpheus) and his recovery from spending nearly a century (or a full century in this version, as his escape is, I think, set in contemporary times) ensnared by an Aleister Crowley-like sorcerer who bites off way more than he can chew trying to capture Death (which happens to be our protagonist's sister).

In his absence, the realm of Dreams has fallen into decay and chaos, and his dream-beings have largely scattered and moved on - most notably the Corinthian, a nightmare that has decided to prowl the waking world as a serial killer.

Re-reading the comics a year or two ago, I realized that the first volume of the Sandman is incredibly dark and horrifying. The show, it seems, at least so far (I haven't gotten to the part with the diner yet, or the "Cereal" convention) to tone things down every so slightly - notably, when Dream punishes the son of his captor after he finally escapes, the fate is somewhat less cruel, cursing him with eternal sleep, rather than eternal waking, as in the comic (Eternal Waking, by the way, is that he keeps "waking up" from a nightmare only to find himself in a different nightmare).

So far, the adaptation is faithful, and it looks like Netflix has spared no expense - the visuals are grand and epic in scope, and polished. We haven't seen much of the Dreaming just yet - I do find that Dream's palace doesn't quite have the weirdly organic (and perhaps sexually suggestive) design that it had in the comics, though I haven't gotten a good enough look at it to decide whether this is a serious downside.

The early issues of Sandman were also strange because they took place within the broader DC Universe - Morpheus encounters Martian Manhunter and John Constantine, as well as an old superhero known as the Sandman that Gaiman's comics were in the broadest sense a reboot of (though not really). Here, we have Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, who appears to simply be a gender-flipped version of John with no explicit mention of her DC equivalent (notably, in the comics, John's ancestor Johanna shows up to confront Dream and his immortal friend Hob in the 1700s investigating rumors that the Devil and the Wandering Jew met at a tavern every century, though she eventually grasps that that's not who they are).

Anyway, the first volume, which I suspect corresponds to this first season, is lent a structure by the fact that Dream must recover the three tools that were stolen from him by the sorcerer who imprisoned him. Later stories become a little broader and more episodic in scope, where Dream becomes less a protagonist than a force of nature within a plot.

I'm three episodes into the season so far, and honestly a little trepidatious about seeing adaptations of the really horrifying stuff that happens involving John Dee.