Hacker Cinema
The Sandman
2022 · TV series · 2 seasons
Created by Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer, Neil Gaiman
Science FictionFantasyDramaActionAdventure
After years of imprisonment, Morpheus — the King of Dreams — embarks on a journey across worlds to find what was stolen from him and restore his power.
11 positive2 negative5 mixed7 neutralfrom 25 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
29 comments on Hacker News
> I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat
If you haven't already, read "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", one of the Sandman stories. It was also adapted by Netflix as the last episode of season 1 of The Sandman.
Just a handful of Western comics you can pick up and read today:
The Sandman (Netflix show), The Best We Could Do, Pride of Baghdad, Superman American Alien, Superman Red Son (animated), I Hate Fairyland, Bone, Epileptic, Paper Girls (turned into an live action show), Monstress, Saga, The Watchmen (turned into a terrible movie, an adaptation show, and an animated show), Stumptown (also got a show I believe), Daytripper, Maus, Berlin…
The Hugo Awards are for SFF, and are voted on by members of this year's WorldCon. After an epidemic of slate voting a while back, a ranked choice system called E Pluribus Hugo was installed, and has been reasonably well-accepted.
The 2023 WorldCon was held in China, for the first time. (It's traditionally outside North America every other year.) There were lots of Chinese-language works on the ballot, which was to be expected -- lots more Chinese-literate people attending.
The rules say that the statistics must be released within 90 days of the convention. Usually they are released the next day. This time, it went all the way to the limit, and arguably beyond.
The statistics, at a first glance, look like they have been coerced.
Several works were adjudicated to be ineligible. Some of them were plausibly inelegible, and a reason was supplied for each. (First published in a prior year, for example.) Some of them were obviously eligible, and no reason was supplied. E.g. R.F. Kuang's novel _Babel_.
The Netflix series The Sandman was ruled ineligible, both in the long form (whole series) and short form (episode 6). The rules say that the admin can choose which category to put a work in if it looks like there's a lot of support for both -- but here the admins decided to drop it from both.
Paul Weimer was dropped from the best fan writer award. No explanation.
Finally, only one member of the admin staff has answered questions at all, and he has been repeating "We acted in accordance with the constitution and the rules we had to obey" over and over again, without further explanation.
So.
Crazy to see The Witcher Season 2 (renewed), Sandman (renewed) and 1899 (cancelled) so closely grouped.
I pay for way more streaming services than I should but unsubscribed from Netflix years ago and started sharing a login with extended family. Even though I have access to it I rarely use Netflix. The only thing I remember watching in the past year is The Sandman. Almost every interesting new show or old movie is available on a different service. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for them.
Focusing on whether or not it has "visual flair" or not seems to be slightly missing the point. For what it's worth I found the visuals solid, but not mind blowing. However beyond the visuals Sandman is probably the best example of a virtually panel by panel comic book to live action adaptation I've seen.
Just getting to watch David Thewlis as John Dee stealing every scene he's in and seeing what Gaiman managed to do with his second chance at doing 24 Hour Diner is easily worth the price of admission. Add to that the pitch perfect recreation of The Sound of Her Wings, and the surprisingly well done Dream of a Thousand Cats and Calliope and you have show series that more than makes up for some of its missteps (I thought the collectors convention didn't work anywhere near as well as it did in the comics for example). If you don't want to watch the whole thing, I recommend giving episodes 4-6 + 11 a go.
Sandman was a remarkably good adaptation and I enjoyed it thoroughly but... yes, it has that bland/cheap Netflix look. I think it's still worth watching though.
I try to keep an open mind.
e.g. I was not holding out much hope when "Damon Lindelof producer of Lost, decided what we really needed was for him to create a new TV series in the Watchman universe"
Whether Neuromancer works out, I have no idea. There's no end of money being wasted by the streamers on prestigious properties - but occasionally you'll get a Watchmen or Good Omens or Sandman.
Other positive is that we're living in a time where these can be "done justice". If it needs to cost $15M an hour to make and run for 10 hours to tell the story properly - well it now can be made.
It might not be told well, it might make bile spew from my very core - but somebody can have a crack at it.
It's hard not to be cynical or entertain thoughts of Hollywood planning these things in case the show sucks. Because they can clearly do entertainment with diverse casting, non-white people, female leads and succeed:
- Tom Holland Spider-Man does not have a red-head MJ, Flash is Indian and the made up best friend is Filipino. - Domino in the Dead Pool movies is black. NTW doesn't seem to have the same powers and is gay. But I'm not sure what the current character status is. - Everything Everywhere All at Once - Black Panther - Shang Chi - Jordan Peele does good work: Nope, Us, Candy Man, Get Out - The Expanse - Life of Pi - Sandman swaps a bunch of stuff
Appetite for completely foreign media is much slower in English speaking countries but once in a while you get a major break through: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Parasite.
For iconic female leads: Terminator has Sarah Connor, Ripley from Aliens, The Bride from Kill Bill, Charlize Therons character in the last Mad Max movie. Buffy. I apologize for how narrow the genres are here.
I don't think the popular media for anything I just mentioned was too negative (maybe Black Panther?). Is it really just the fans? I bet the overlap of Rings of Power watchers and watchers of the stuff I listed is pretty big ...
edit: formatting
Wow people are very judgmental these days, it's a show most are getting for free. Try to enjoy it and not nitpick details. I agree its not like The sandman or other better created shows but it's okay however a waste of money imo.
Amazon execs have no understanding of art/cinema. Don't expect much from the teams they organize.
Mhhh yeah it was. But the real collapse in quality with Wheel of Time started with Episode 4 and got worse with every single episode.
In total Wheel of Time was terrible, and didn't look good. Rings at least has some good visuals.
Lets hope Rings gets better. Sadly for now it looks like both shows will end up rated button tier.
At least House of the Dragon and The Sandman didn't disappoint.
Will check it out. I’m enjoying sandman. Not loving it but am enjoying it enough to continue.
I couldn’t continue wheel of time after 3 episodes.
> I don't get reviews saying that TRoP, or some other new prestige TV series, is "terrible", or "a disaster", based on the first couple of episodes.
The ironic thing here is that most of the reviews from critics of this show have been positive. Not necessarily wild raves, but, you know, pretty positive.
It's possible that the Critics Just Don't Get It, Man, or whatever trope people will pull out to explain why professional critics should be summarily dismissed and only the users reviews are real opinions that we should listen to, but I'd argue that it's also possible that fandom in general has become entitled to the point of toxicity over the last couple of decades. After decades of good "genre" movies being few and far between and good genre television, especially fantasy and superhero, being even more vanishingly rare, now we've got it coming out of our ears and we are, apparently, really fucking pissed off that what we get doesn't match the unattainably perfect shows in our heads or something. And this isn't even getting into the way today's politics have crept in, but it's extremely hard not to notice that a substantial subset of fans angry with The Rings of Power or Ms. Marvel or The Sandman or whatever are specifically calling out changes that they have to preface with "I'm not racist, but...". I suspect if they'd made a TV version of The Sandman 20 years ago, before any and all attempts at diverse casting would be met with outrage by a loud minority, and cast a black actress as Death, the predominant reaction would have been: "Huh. Weird, but maybe she'll be pretty good in the part, let's see."
I haven't seen The Rings of Power yet, and I don't know if I will, but based on most of the reviews from people who aren't in the Angry Angry Fan Brigade, I expect it to look really good, have solid casting, have somewhat pedestrian plotting, and suffer from somewhat clunky dialogue. I also expect it to feel unnecessary in the grand scheme of adaptations. But I don't expect to be some kind of affront to Tolkien fans everywhere, and I think the AAFB just needs to chill out about this, like they need to about so many other things. (For context, I feel Jackson's LotR adaptation looked really good, had solid casting, and had somewhat pedestrian direction, most notably in Jackson's inability to let any moment anywhere remain small and quiet.)
Have you seen Severance? It doesn't suck.
Sandman sucks. I liked the comics. Had high hopes for the show. But sucks.
Rings of Power. Haven't seen it. Probably sucks. Movies were gaudy but shallow.
Its not about Dutch Angles at all - this article just sucks. Trust me - I am a film nerd. I own a camera on the Netflix approved list.
There is absolutely no reason shooting in 4K HDR on the approved cameras and then going through Netflix compression would result in any of the things they are talking about at the start (moody lighting, etc etc). This is just a stylistic choice when shot / lit / edited. In fact shooting on one of Netflix approved cameras and shooting in something like 4K HDR ProRess or DNxHD gives you a ton MORE flexiblity to colour correct your footage for a completely different look after the fact. If they wanted to they could re-edit The Sandman right now and make the whole thing an insanely colourful show. Goodluck doing that shooting in compressed H264.
TLDR: Netflix just likes greenlighting a lot of angsty content and that kind of content gets lit, shot, and colour corrected like this (current day). Its just the current style at the time. It also looks really impressive if you do have a 4K HDR TV and maximizes the higher dynamic range.
> I think this is just clickbait... find something popular, trash it,
They don't trash it. This is what they actually say about the overall quality of The Sandman:
> Against all odds, Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman is a very good show.
"A very good show".
They then go on to claim there's a general "look" of cheapness to Netflix shows which means one can usually tell something was produced by Netflix. They describe some general characteristics, and they don't do the best job at actually displaying examples of said characteristics. Though I do know what they mean, having watched a few episodes of the show (which I like).
My experience as well!
I guess the Sandman TV show benefited from Neil Gaiman's watching over it. He claims he blocked many a bad Sandman adaptation from being produced, and this one -- with its inevitable changes -- has his approval and oversight. I think it shows.
I'm finding The Sandman enjoyable for what it is, so far (3 episodes into it).
Nothing to rave about, and it suffers from some dodgy production issues, but then again the comics (er, "graphic novels") didn't really have amazing artwork anyway! It was all about the novel (for its time) and adult story by Neil Gaiman.
I don't find Sturridge's emotionless face distracting, because the Sandman is pretty inscrutable anyway. What I do find distracting is his youth; it doesn't really convey the agelessness of the character, I would have expected either someone a bit older, or one of those real-life people you can never tell their age.
> The guy playing John Dee is David Thewlis, one of the best cinema actors of all time.
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 feel it's ironic to say this for The Sandman, but for me the standard woke changes to the source material hurt the story, as they forced Dream to be a much weaker character. Johanna Constantine for instance starts off rude and dismissive towards Dream, since this is the sort of behavior writers use to telegraph strong female character nowadays -- which ended up making the main character feel weaker when he's not taken seriously. Lucien's change was of no importance to the story, but just threw me off a bit from how I pictured mentally the comics.
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
The issue with this season is that while the comics are beloved, the first book is quite weak; Gaiman was still finding his voice, still experimenting with what the books were going to be, and constrained by editorial requirements from DC. The first several issues are full of cringey tie-ins to other DC IP, and the horror elements are forced (The Sandman is not a horror comic series).
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.
From what I bore to watch, it's a quite faithful adaptation - even if somewhat simplified.
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.
I have watched the first three episodes so far and like it. I never followed Gaiman's comic strip Sandman, so I did 10 minutes of web browsing and reading before starting. I also watched part of an interview with Gaiman on YouTube about the new series.
I don't like writing about things I haven't seen (not a Netflix subscriber), but since this is the Internet after all I'd like to discuss the "Morpheus vs Lucifer" scene that was uploaded yesterday [1] and that no one should watch unless they like their episodes spoiled.
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".
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=iZOwaeAEIw0
I think it's a whole genre that was finally allowed into mainstream. For a long time we had very black/white view on the superheroes in movies. Only relatively recently Batman got a bit interesting, Star Wars had someone turn "bad", Ironman was a good jerk, Starlord... was a good jerk, Loki and Deadpool are pretty chaotic, now Sandman is soon coming out. We have a number of "that bad character had reasons" movies like Cruella.
Those existed for ages in comic books, but I don't think mainstream / Disney would touch them.
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman has three episodes dedicated to Shakespeare (and one features his son Hamnet). This is a good analysis of how isolation and genius in art relates, in the context of Shakespeare in The Sandman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhA0GVi_N4E
I really liked Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book, all his short story collections, Coraline...and Stardust is probably in my top 5 favorite movies (so much to where I'm scared to read the book). I'm not a big Sandman fan...it is just so dark.
Kids aren't the only ones. Most of us in the wealthy West now have so many entertainment options that we ignore even many of the ones we've already paid for, or are continuing to pay for. Half the time I forget I have Prime Video at all, and I've temporarily got Showtime for Twin Peaks but despite knowing there are probably tons of other shows and movies on it (and not on Netflix/Prime) that I'd enjoy I've not even looked at the rest of their catalog aside from ~5min scanning through it when I first signed up.
I have a total of probably 60+ entirely unplayed games for the PS2, PS3, Xbox360, Gamecube, and Wii, picked up cheap used or in digital PS+ freebies or sales but not touched since. Hundreds of hours of entertainment which I'd probably enjoy and many of which have at least some artistic merit but they sit unused. We recently picked up a PS4, so now games are accumulating for that too. Don't get me started on Steam/GoG. My to-read list of just books I own is solidly in the 3 digits. We've still got a couple DVDs kicking around that we bought over a decade ago for next to nothing used, never watched.
I've never found time to catch up on all the music I pirated 10+ years ago, sometimes in large dumps of material from friends who were more into tracking down The Good Stuff than I was (keeping up with all that meta-reading to learn what's worth your time itself takes tons of time) let alone listen to much new music aside from a handful of CDs purchased and listened-to after live shows over the years. Spotify and such can go to hell, I don't got time and the last thing I need is another way to find things I like but won't have time to pursue.
I end up seeing a more-or-less random 25-50% of the movies that are probably excellent and I'd likely really enjoy that come out every year. There are hundreds of culturally and artistically important movies from the last 100+ years still on my to-watch list, but the ones I miss each year keep making the list longer rather than shorter. Most are easily available. Some of them I could go watch right now (Netflix, et c.)
I'm still meaning to read Sandman and a dozen other acclaimed, important comics, to say nothing of all the ones I'd probably enjoy as pure bubble-gum entertainment. I've barely scratched the surface on that entire format.
Plus I've got all that stuff in life that's not just "consuming" media.
I've truly got more excellent art/entertainment readily available than I have time for, by a large margin. We live in strange times.
[EDIT] Oh, and let's not forget the ~a billion hours of free entertainment on Youtube, podcasts, archive.org, and so on, much of it good. I'm not much into that stuff because wow do I ever not have time to sort wheat from chaff let alone enjoy said wheat, but it's all right there and I could seek it out any time I please.
I'm going to a very different route than my colleagues: Sandman by Neil Gaiman. It's a series of graphic novels which delves deeply into theology, philosophy, and the human condition.
Since it's in the form of a graphic novel, it's much more like "reading" a TV miniseries, and makes for a great introduction to Neil Gaiman's writing style (which will take you straight off the deep end into the fantasy genre). They're also easier to pick up and set down as the whim strikes.
If you really enjoy the setting, the Lucifer series of graphic novels takes one of the most interesting characters from the setting and expands upon it. It was adapted to a TV show as well, much to the chagrin of anybody who actually enjoyed the graphic novels.