"The Boys," Year Three

Spoilers ahead.

Well, at this point you're either a fan of "The Boys" or you're not.  I've committed to watching the show for at least another season, but I think I've definitely reached the point of diminishing returns.  The show feels like it has set an end goal, which is to destroy Homelander, and now it's doing its best to delay doing that for as long as possible.  And this sort of thing drives me nuts.

This season follows essentially the same beats as the last one.  A new character is introduced, Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), a legendary superhero who has been MIA for decades, but may hold the key to Homelander's defeat.  Multiple episodes are spent building him up, and his inevitable confrontation with Homelander, only to end with an anticlimactic clash and Soldier Boy being put back on ice.  A couple of minor characters are killed, the various romantic relationships are threatened and mended, and way too much is kicked down the road, to be dealt with in a future season.  The Deep and A-Train get a little character growth, but not so much as to affect anything.  Hughie becomes an asshole, but straightens out pretty quickly.  Starlight finally quits the Seven, but probably not for good.  

Two new wrinkles that are actually consequential this year are that the Boys team temporarily get to use superpowers - no secret because it's a big plot point in the original comics - and Homelander becomes Donald Trump.  The second point is the more interesting development, because it acknowledges the reality that outright fascists with the right messaging and the right amount of hype can enjoy immense popularity and get away with just about anything.  There are MAGA spoofs and references all over the place this season, and the ending even literalizes one of Trump's most famous claims, that he could murder someone in broad daylight and people would still clap.  Most of Homelander's screen time is spent doing away with all the little safeguards that supposedly keep him in check, and consolidating his power.  He's still fun to watch and root against, but his endless escalations are getting tedious.  

You can tell where most of the show's attention is by what the marketing has been crowing loudest about - Herogasm.  The notorious superhero orgy referenced in previous seasons has been brought to the screen in truly NC-17 fashion this year, and it's…  okay.  There is a lot of nudity and kinky business onscreen uncensored, and some of it is funny, and some of it is outrageous, and I'm glad everyone seemed to have a good time with it.  There is more sexuality in general this season, including an earlier fight using sex toys as weaponry.  However, there's also still a notable prurience around sex in the show, where our main couples - Frenchy and Kimiko, and Hughie and Starlight - are never shown doing much more than cuddling.  That dichotomy worries me a bit.  

 

We're still living in a superhero obsessed culture, so there's still plenty for "The Boys" to skewer.  This year there's a full Vought-themed Disneyland full of rides and merch.  One of the better subplots involves A-Train trying to stop a racist superhero from harassing his old community without running afoul of Vought's PR demands.  However, this isn't "Watchmen," and there's not much depth to any of the commentary.  "The Boys" is first and foremost about getting good action scenes, black humor, and shock value out of the material, and any real grappling with heavier issues feels like an afterthought.  I liked where Hughie and the Boys were at the beginning of the season, trying to address superhero accountability from different, more structured roles as part of the government bureaucracy, but this quickly falls apart because the person in charge is another secret villain.     

I'm running out of patience with "The Boys" because it seems to have found a groove it is comfortable with, and I can see the show idling here for several more seasons, if it doesn't just go full "Walking Dead" and decide to never pay off anything that it's set up.  I like several of the actors and performances enough to stick around for a while, but the show's novelty has pretty much worn off, and even hardcore nudity doesn't seem all that much fun anymore.  

---

Pick Up "The Black Phone"

I appreciate that "The Black Phone" is a very specific, very personal piece of horror.  It takes place in the midwestern America suburbia of the late 1970s, a more dangerous era for kids.  Our protagonists are a pair of siblings, 13 year-old Finney (Mason Thames) and his slightly younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw).  Their father, played by Jeremy Davies, is an abusive alcoholic and Finney is regularly targeted by local bullies.  So things are already bad for these two before a serial child-killer, The Grabber (Ethan Hawke), comes into their lives.    

Based on a short story by Joe Hill, "The Black Phone" is working with some very familiar parts and pieces.  The most obvious are the Stephen King media starring kids, especially "IT," but also all the nostalgic throwbacks to various '70s and '80s horror that we've seen lately.  "The Black Phone" wants to make the point that actually living through this time was a lot rougher than "Stranger Things" would have you believe.  Kids had more freedom, but there were also  far fewer safeguards.  Arguably the most upsetting scenes in "The Black Phone" are the early ones, where Gwen is beaten by her father, and where Finney is attacked by bullies.  Gwen's a spitfire who won't hesitate to curse out cops or tackle a boy twice her size, but Finney needs to toughen up.  And when he's targeted by the Grabber, this becomes a matter of life or death.

This premise may sound overly glum, but "The Black Phone" is designed to be a crowd pleaser, and an efficient delivery system for setups and payoffs that are very satisfying to see play out.  However, it also demands more from its audience than most.  The Grabber is a great new movie monster, and the great part is that we know very little about him.  "The Black Phone" has ghosts and prophetic dreams and this psycho killer who likes to dress in freaky costumes and play freaky games, and we're never given the rules for how any of it works.  The audience has to actively try and connect the dots themselves.  I suspect the horror literate, who are more familiar with these concepts, will enjoy the film more than the casual viewers for this reason.  If you need the Grabber to have a backstory and an explanation for his particular strand of psychopathy, I'm sure there will be a sequel coming along in a few years, but I like that writer/director Scott Derrickson and his co-writer C. Robert Cargill let the mystery be for this first outing.  

The scale of the movie stays limited to the experiences of Finny and Gwen, which keeps it appropriately kid-sized.  This is a Blumhouse production from the guys who made "Sinister," so the budget is small, but "The Black Phone" doesn't cut corners, and occasionally delivers some pretty gorgeous horror imagery.  There's a lot of attention paid to getting the little period details right, and both of the main child actors are given the space to give full, nuanced performances.  The movie rests almost entirely on their shoulders, and while there are the occasional awkward moments toward the beginning, they deliver when it counts.  There's so much inherent suspense and drama that comes with scenarios of kids in realistic peril, it would have been easy to do too much.  Thankfully, the filmmakers picked the right kids for the job and trusted them.    

I haven't said much about the plot, because it's best to go in with as little information as possible.  I'll just say that there's not much original here, and the trailer gives away enough that a sharp viewer could probably  guess how everything plays out just from that.  However, the old tropes and ideas are executed with great skill, by people who clearly care about the material.  I'm not remotely surprised that Derrickson based a lot of the film's vision of suburban hell on his own childhood, and I'm sure everyone involved grew up on traumatic Stephen King movies.  There's some potent nostalgia at work, and not the pleasant kind, and that's a nice change of pace, honestly.  This feels like one of those films that doesn't come along often anymore - an R-rated film that is unambiguously mature and horrific, while still genuinely being about kids and childhood. 

  

---

My Top Ten "Kids in the Hall" Sketches (New to Me)

After watching the entire 1989-1995 "Kids in the Hall" series, and realizing how much of it was completely new to me, I decided to compile a list of my favorite sketches that I hadn't seen when I originally watched the show, over twenty years ago.  Broader thoughts on the whole series were discussed in the previous post, but this time I want to get into specific sketches.

I'll be referring to the cast by their first names, because I don't care to keep typing out Foley, Thompson, McKinney, McDonald, and McCullough.  And after over a hundred episodes, I think we're past the need for formalities.

My original Top Ten list is here.

Brian's Bombshell - This time around, I was much more interested in the show's more down-to-earth characters.  Fran, played by Scott, was almost immediately a favorite, a caricature of a long-suffering, narrow-minded, middle-aged housewife.  Her first appearance was in the pilot, alongside her asshole spouse Gordon, and wayward son Brian.  Fran monologues as she hangs laundry, worries about her family, casually drops the n-word, and is altogether sincerely loveable and groan-worthy.

Indian Drum - Mark has cymbals and is screaming about his missing Indian drum, Kevin has the missing drum and is screaming about finding it, and I temporarily lost the ability to breathe.  This one is so brief, but acts as a concentrated dose of pure absurdity.  Something about how the guys are positioned on different floors of a building, the rat-a-tat pattern of the dialogue, and the fact that they're shouting these missives past each other is just perfect.  It's human Muppets, and I mean that as a compliment.

Comfortable - My favorite new find.  I love how Scott keeps getting more outrageous, and the audience is eating it up.  "Kids in the Hall" is known for pushing boundaries, and this is one of the best examples of their willingness to escalate into pretty wild territory.  The stage version is supposed to be even raunchier, apparently once resulting in a broken table.  The sketch wouldn't work, however, if the characters didn't work as characters.  In the end I found myself sympathizing with poor Nina for her terrible faux pas.  

Dead Dad - I wanted to put "Womyn" here, but I know it's one I saw long ago and just didn't appreciate as much at the time.  So, let's move on to the similar "Dead Dad," another of the semi-recurring sketches with all five of the Kids playing versions of themselves, hanging out, having an insane conversation.  Here they talk about fighting their dads, which fits right in with the show's obsession with dysfunctional families, and shows off each of their quirks - Kevin is a coward, Mark values consistency, etc.  

Raise - An exercise in meta humor, where Kevin and Dave navigate Dave's poorly written sketch about a guy asking for a raise.  After some banter about lazy writing and stupid character names, Kevin discovers that Dave has neglected to write an ending, trapping them both there.  If that weren't enough, this turns out to be a two-parter, and we check in on the pair in a second segment, twenty days later, grimly facing their doom as supplies run low.  And all that Dave can offer is more stupid character names.

Opened Up - The Kevin and Dave pairings are usually my favorites because Kevin's great at playing the insecure dweeb, and Dave delivers prime sardonic evil, and it's even funnier when they switch roles.  They play a lot of variations on this, most famously as Simon and Hecubus. In "Opened Up," it's this dynamic at an office party, plus a subversion that is played out for exactly as long as it should be, with a great ending punchline.  I still have this in my notes as the "Hey, Fifty Bucks!" sketch.     

The Beard - I think Kevin and Mark have probably grown on me the most as performers as I revisited the show this time.  This sketch is completely dependent on Kevin's performance, and he really sells his character's descent into vacation beard-fuelled madness.  There's really not much to the premise beyond a common horror framework, but Kevin makes it absolutely hysterical to see play out.  I think this is one of the best filmed pieces from the show's final seasons.  Oh look, and it's Nina again!

New Boots - Bruce is probably the Kids member who is the most hit-or-miss for me, but when he scores a hit, it's usually a great one.  I love "New Boots" because I had no idea where it was going, even though so much of it is telegraphed far in advance.  The whole bit with testing out the steel-toed boots in painful ways is a perfect distraction from what's really going on.  The production quality here is especially impressive, using good sound design and some choice shots to really sell the punchlines.  

Rockey - I can't make heads or tails of the title, but this one boils down to a four minute version of "Click," where every time Kevin leaves the room, he comes back to find his girlfriend, played by Dave, has drastically fast-forwarded to a different point in life.  This one's all in the execution, where Kevin's bewildered reaction shots are doing half the work, and Dave's absolute sincerity will tolerate no questioning.  So much of this one depends on getting the timing exactly right, and they get it right.

Step Class - Finally, the Kids' willingness to wear ridiculous outfits and make themselves up into these ostentatious characters is a big part of their appeal.  The second I saw Bruce and Mark in the leotards, the leggings, and the big '80s hair wigs to play rival aerobics instructors, I was already on the floor.  The resulting catfight and Scott showing up in a coral activewear ensemble was just the icing on the cake. 

Honorable Mentions: Womyn, Lady is a Tramp, Go For Guilt, I Can't Play the Piano, Emergency Troupe Meeting, Reg, Skoora!, Sex Girl Patrol, Brucio, Relocation, and Poor Richard 

---

Does "The Kids in the Hall" Hold Up?

I've finished watching all 101 episodes of the original 1989-1995 run of "The Kids in the Hall."  While I became a fan through watching the reruns in college decades ago, I'd never seen the full, unedited versions before.  I estimate that roughly half of the episodes were completely new to me.  I'd never seen any of the sketches with the "Extreme" or "Steps" characters, no Tammy, no Croation cabbie, and I never knew there was more than one sketch with the King of Empty Promises.  With the recent revival of the series in 2022, "Kids in the Hall" is seeing a nice resurgence of popularity, and there have been a lot of old fans coming out of the woodwork and remarking about how well the show has held up compared to other comedy of its time.  

Well, some of it has and some of it hasn't.  There's no getting away from how different the culture was in the late '80s and early '90s.  While "Kids" was very ahead of its time in terms of portraying women and the LGBT community, it was pretty miserable every time it tried to do anything with race.  The five members of the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe, Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, Mark McKinney, Bruce McCullough, and Kevin McDonald, are all white men.  They wrote sketches with women in them and would play the parts themselves in drag.  And they also wrote sketches with black and brown people in them occasionally, and appeared in blackface and brownface to play them.  Mark McKinney's blues musician character Mississippi Gary showed up in the very first episode, made appearances on the show until the third season, and later popped up in their live shows, rewritten to be a very out-of-touch white guy in blackface.  There's not an ounce of malice in any of these sketches, but the cringe is off the charts.

Then there's the LGBT content.  Scott Thompson was one of the only out gay comedians at the time, and "The Kids in the Hall" ran during the height of the AIDS crisis when homophobia was rampant.  Thompson used his unusual visibility to fight back as best he could, even devoting one of his Buddy Cole monologues to calling out haters like Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison.  The f-slur is all over the show, and from interviews I've dug up, this was deliberate on Thompson's part - he wanted to reclaim the word the way that "queer" eventually would be.  This didn't work out, and now the culture has changed so drastically since "The Kids in the Hall" went off the air that some of these sketches need an awful lot of additional context and qualifiers to parse.  However, they're also a fascinating encapsulation of the prevailing attitudes of the times, and really should be in wider circulation.     

I got so much out of working my way through the whole show in order, seeing how the characters evolved, and how the production kept getting more ambitious and impressive every season.  In year one, most of the sketches were adapted from the troupe's existing stage material, and everything felt much more scroungy and low budget.  As the show gained momentum, more and more filmed pieces were incorporated, and everyone eventually figured out how to write for television.  The costuming and makeup went from barely passable in the first season to jaw-dropping quality in the fifth.  Even now, there were instances where I completely forgot Dave Foley in drag wasn't actually a woman, because the work was just that good.  

"Kids in the Hall" is unusual for a sketch show because it is an unapologetically provocative and adult piece of work, with material that kept it from ever becoming mainstream, but it ran for over a hundred episodes.  It was also remarkably consistent, maybe because it all came from the same small group of comedians who got away with more than people thought they could.  Not every sketch was a winner, and the show had its ups and downs in quality, and inevitable bouts of repetitiveness, but when it worked, it worked.  The absurdism and the rebelliousness and the GenX worldview of "Kids in the Hall" made it distinctive and memorable.  It's more nostalgic than subversive now, and some elements are very out of date, but I'd argue that more of it holds up than not.    

As much as I love the weirder characters, the show's enduring fascination with and hatred of corporate culture and dysfunctional families was what really drove it, and those themes have stayed pretty universal and relevant.  I'll get into that more in the next installment, where I talk about the top ten sketches that were new to me from watching "Kids in the Hall"  this time around.

---

My 2022 Youtube Playlist

My yearly Youtube playlist is mostly made up of media ephemera that's difficult to categorize, and the only thing they really have in common is utilizing a strong musical element. Still, I think that they're worth recommending and writing about. This batch includes film segments, tie-in music videos, award show hijinks, and oddball musical numbers you probably forgot about

So May We Start - I was looking forward to "Annette," the big musical collaboration between French filmmaker Leos Carax and Canadian musicians, Sparks, consisting of Ron and Russell Mael.  I ended up being fairly cool on the movie, but the opening number is fantastic, and the best way I can think of to start this list.  

Sooner or Later - We lost Stephen Sondheim not too long ago, and among his many credits are the songs for the 1990 film "Dick Tracy," including this jazz  number for Madonna's character, Breathless Mahoney.  Madonna in this clip is performing at the 1991 Academy Awards, where "Sooner or Later" won Best Original Song.  Of all the '80s icons who have been getting time in the limelight lately, I think Madonna is well overdue for more recognition.  

I Enjoy Being A Girl - Carol Burnett, Chita Rivera, and Caterina Valente sing this number from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Flower Drum Song," while dressed up like creatures of the night - with Boris Karloff dropping in for a quick cameo.  This performance was taken from a 1965 episode of "The Entertainers," a short-lived variety show that Burnett and Valente hosted with Bob Newhart.

The Animaniacs Suite - The final episode of "Animaniacs" that aired in 1998 included a clip montage with a seven-minute medley of the show's musical themes, arranged by Richard Stone and played by the Warner Bros. Studio Symphony.  And boy, the music has never sounded better, including the orchestral arrangements of "Pinky and the Brain," "Slappy Squirrel," "Rita and Runt," "Goodfeathers," and "Mindy and Buttons" themes.

We're Doing a Sequel - This is the extended version of the opening to "Muppets Most Wanted," which happily pokes fun at selling out and bad sequels.  I love that it also predicts the inevitability of "Toy Story 4."  The song was written by "Flight of the Conchords" veteran Bret McKenzie, and features vocals from Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett and all of our favorite muppets.  Say what you like about "Muppets Most Wanted," but the music didn't lose a step.  

Let's Live For Today - The Apple TV+ series "Pachinko" deserves so much more recognition that it's gotten for the fantastic first season.  Its lone Emmy nomination was for its main titles, so here they are.  Set to The Grass Roots' cover of "Let's Live for Today," (originally an Italian song from Shel Shapiro, Mogol, and Michael Julien), here's the main cast of "Pachinko" dancing in the pachinko parlor, briefly putting their cares aside.

I'm Still Here - "Treasure Planet" has quietly become a cult favorite since its disastrous release in 2003.  Goo Goo Dolls member John Rzeznik, contributed two songs to the movie's soundtrack, "I'm Still Here" and "Always Know Where You Are."  I've linked the little seen music video for "I'm Still Here," which features some "Treasure Planet" iconography.  It's an interesting curiosity, part of the ephemera of a film that Disney likes to pretend doesn't exist.  

Suspirium - I loved the Luca Guadagnino remake of "Suspiria," but one nagging issue I had was with Thom Yorke's music.  Maybe it was because I missed the Goblins, or maybe it was because it was just so different from what I expected, but I thought York's work was a total mismatch.  Since then, it's grown on me considerably, particularly the title track.  Here's the official music video, accompanied by animation from Russ Murphy/RUFFMERCY.

The Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles at the 2020 Independent Spirit Awards - They are here to honor LGBTQ representation in film and, of course, Laura Dern.  

We Think We Know You - Finally, I think this is my favorite thing that Bo Burnham has ever done, which is more performance art than it is comedy or musical satire.  "We Think We Know You" is the finale of his 2013 comedy special "what," which he released free on Youtube.  There are several clips of older performances of this piece, in different stages of its creation, littering social media and other video platforms, but this is the full, perfected, version, and it's a stunner.  

---

"The Sandman" (With Spoilers)

Spoiler warnings for the first season, but I'll avoid anything from future comics arcs.

I think the "24/7" episode, the adaptation of the comic stories "24 Hours" and "Sound and Fury" is a good encapsulation of some of my doubts about the series.  "24 Hours," about John Dee experimenting on the patrons of a diner, is one of the darkest stories I've ever encountered in any medium, and I was half-anticipating and half-dreading the adaptation.  The version that appears in the Netflix series retains the broad outlines of what happens, but the specifics are very different.  It's much more of a slow burn psychological thriller that glosses over the horrific outcomes much more quickly.  The episode is very good at being a one-location stand alone story, with excellent performances by David Thewlis and the rest of the cast, but then it shoves all of "Sound and Fury" into about ten minutes at the end, and glosses over all the damage that John Dee and the ruby caused outside of the diner.  The whole climax of this arc is incredibly rushed, and I'm not sure if people who weren't familiar with the comic could follow what was going on.

This is probably the most egregious example of adaptation issues in the whole show, but they do keep cropping up.  There's no attempt to explain how Unity Kincaid (Sandra James-Young) managed to live to be over 110, for instance, or to make the climactic cereal convention more plausible.  I was delighted that the convention story was adapted, in all of its darkly comedic glory, with so many of the awful visual gags intact.  However, I sympathize with those viewers who took one look at the sinister attendees and wondered how they could have possibly thought they were fooling anybody.  Frankly, it's a miracle that any of the "Sandman" works in live action as well as it does.  As much as I might bemoan the never-ending encroachment of CGI, there is no way that a show like "Sandman" could exist without it.  Also, it was a lovely surprise to discover that some of the stories work very well onscreen, including the potent "The Sound of Her Wings" and "Men of Good Fortune" combo that followed "24/7."  If the show continues past the first season, I hope that the creators will lean into its anthology nature more.        

What I appreciate the most about the show, after seeing so many other remakes and reboots lately, is that Neil Gaiman and Alan Heinberg allowed many of the characters to be different, and make different choices.  The parts of the series that don't work, often don't work because they're too faithful to the comics.  Did we really need all of the eccentrics from the boarding house run by Hal (John Cameron Mitchell) in the show?  Initially I was worried when the Corinthian and John Dee were being made more sane and less monstrous, but this also makes them more compelling characters to follow.  Yes, Dream is more human and less otherworldly, but there's a wonderful balance maintained between making him a god-like creature, and ensuring that he's still sympathetic.  He kills Gregory because the story needs more stakes, but he brings back Gault (Ann Ogbomo) (a big upgrade from Brute and Glob) to show that he's capable of reform.  I find myself thinking of Dream not as an extension of the Dream from the comics, but an entirely new version that only exists in the television series.  And I'm rooting for him.

There's been a lot of commentary about so many prominent characters in the show being black women, including Death, Lucienne, Gault, Rosemary (Sarah Niles), and Rose Walker (Vanesu Samunyai).  This feels like Neil Gaiman recognizing a major representation problem from the original comics, where there was a disturbing motif of black women burning to death.  I'm not saying that this was a conscious choice.  Who knows?  Maybe the old line about picking the best actors for the roles, and they all just happened to be black women is really, honestly true this time.  I'm convinced it's the case for Kirby Howell-Baptiste, who is the best Death I ever could have hoped for.  That said, the dodgy VFX trying to show the literal shadow of her wings is terrible.  So much of the effects work in this show looks great, but some of the little design choices like this, and Lucifer's outfits boggle me.    

And of course, a big part of that is because I am a massive "Sandman" fan, and there was no way I was ever going to be totally satisfied with any screen version.  I spent years wondering what the show's opening credits sequence would look like, and the Netflix show doesn't have one.  However, it does have Abel (Asim Chaudhry) and Cain (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and Irving/Goldie.  And it does have Hob Gadling. And it has me hyped up for a second season, right when I thought I was done being hyped up for anything.  It feels very, very good to know the show is in the right hands, and to be able to wholeheartedly recommend this to people alongside the comics.

---

"The Sandman" (Without Spoilers)

I've been waiting for an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comics for roughly twenty years now, and I have a lot to say about the Netflix show.  I'll be devoting two posts to it - first a general review with thoughts on how "Sandman" fits into the current superhero industrial complex, and next time a spoilery analysis that will get into the details of changes from the comics, and all the plotty bits.

I'm incredibly curious about how the general public is going to react to "The Sandman," because it's not your typical comic book superhero or YA fantasy show, despite sharing some characteristics with each.  It's an unusually faithful adaptation of the "Sandman" DC comics for adult readers, which gained a cult following among people who didn't normally read comics, and had more storytelling ambitions than any other comic being written at the time.  The main character, Dream (Tom Sturridge), aka the Sandman, aka Morpheus, is one of the Endless, a powerful, immortal family of beings that embody and look after some of the primal forces of the universe.  Dream rules over a realm called The Dreaming, inhabited by dreams and nightmares. In 1919, an occult practitioner, Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance), manages to summon and capture Dream, with terrible consequences.

Eventually Dream escapes, and we spend the rest of the ten-episode season watching him track down and recover his lost tools and items of power, hunt wayward nightmares, and try to put his kingdom back in order.  Some have taken advantage of his absence, such as The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), a charming nightmare who has rows of teeth where eyes should be, and a reality-warping madman named John Dee (David Thewlis).  There is a lot of violence and a fair amount of sex in "The Sandman,"  though the show has steered away from the episodes of out-and-out horror that characterized the early issues of the comic.  I can't emphasize enough how rare it is to see this kind of very adult, but very sincere and thoughtful urban fantasy brought to the screen with the kind of budget and resources that "Sandman" has.  There's a ton of CGI imagery to bring talking ravens and puppyish gargoyles to life, as well as to send Dream on a quest to Hell, and to travel through the dreams of the unconscious.  The cast, which includes Gwendolyn Christie, Mark Hamill, Patton Oswalt, and Stephen Fry, is extraordinary.  

 

I like the end result, but not as much as I want to like it.  There are inevitably things that are going to be lost in any adaptation, and I suspect that disappointments are inevitable when you've had your own personal vision of something percolating in your head for twenty years.  I think the best thing I can say about Netflix's "Sandman" is that I like all of the additions - new characters, new motives, and new details to help update the material.  However, I can't help missing the strong visual elements from the comics.  "Sandman" was created at the end of the '80s, and alternative and goth aesthetics were a big part of the book's DNA.  Now that the action has been moved to the present day, all the rough edges are gone.  There's a blandness and a cleanness to the look of the show that makes everything look very shiny and impressive, but awfully safe.  Dream has gone from looking like a badass '80s rock star to a much more ordinary human being.  Sturridge does well in an impossible role, but there's room for improvement.  

On the other hand, other changes have been excellent.  Lots of the characters benefit from race and gender blind casting, so Dream's librarian Lucien is now the loyal Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong), his sister Death is played by the lovely, dark-skinned Kirby Howell Baptiste, and Lucifer (Christie) looks less like David Bowie and more like Brienne of Tarth.  The rights to DC universe exorcist John Constantine are tied up, so he's been swapped out for Gaiman's original creation, Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman).  "Sandman" was always known for its strong LGBT representation, and that continues here, with characters like the nonbinary Desire (Mason Alexander Park).  There's also been a lot of careful streamlining of the story, and most of the villains are treated with more sympathy.  The edgy nihilism of some of the darkest stories has been curbed, as it doesn't really fit how the rest of the series plays out.  However, the creators found ways to retain many of the little one-off characters and side stories that made "Sandman" so unique, like Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley), the immortal man that Dream has a drink with once every century. 

Part of me is still getting used to the idea that this series actually exists, and has been made with enough fidelity that I can actually criticize things like how the story arcs have been rearranged, and which characters need more screen time.  It's difficult to say if some of my issues with certain episodes are due to  being much too familiar with the comics, but there have been as many hits as misses, and the hits have been better than I ever dreamed possible.  It's going to take me a while to fully process, but it looks like "The Sandman" has finally made it to the small screen, and the wait was worth it.

More next time.

---