"Sandman" is Coming

An adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic has been one of my holy grails for decades.  It is far and away one of my favorite pieces of media, and I've kept an eye on the various attempts to turn it into a theatrical film or television series over the years.  After multiple failures, I've learned not to get my hopes up whenever a new effort is announced. This time around, however, it looks like it's finally going to happen.  

Netflix has just paid DC an exorbitant sum just to license the property, and "Sandman" creator Neil Gaiman is onboard as an executive producer, along with David Goyer.  However, the creative reins seem to be with Allan Heinberg, who wrote "Wonder Woman" for Patty Jenkins, and has a background in comics. The plan is to adapt the first arc of "Sandman," "Preludes and Nocturnes," into an eleven episode first season.  Something could still go wrong at this point, as it has with every other attempt to adapt "Sandman." Netflix has been trying to curb expenses, and several high profile projects have never made it out of development. However, the odds look pretty good compared to the last few attempts.

And I have such mixed feelings about it.  Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that no adaptation of "Sandman" is far preferable to a bad adaptation of "Sandman."  Going the series route means that there's going to be more opportunity to do "Sandman" right, to give the story the time and space that it needs.  However, the creators may waste that opportunity. The worst case scenario is what happened to "Lucifer," the adaptation of a "Sandman" spinoff comic.  The FOX "Lucifer" series just took a couple of the characters and concepts from the comic and stuck them together with a typical police procedural formula.  Suddenly a series about examining the nature of free will was about fighting crime. And "Lucifer" was a hit, of course, running three years on FOX and another on Netflix.     

Also, frankly the creative team isn't inspiring much confidence.  Gaiman's involvement is a plus, of course, but Goyer has a very mixed track record.  I'm less familiar with Heinberg, but the vast majority of his television work is in dramedies and soaps, like "Grey's Anatomy" and "The O.C."  I know the auteur theory is bunk, but there doesn't seem to be anyone with a really strong voice or vision involved here, like a Noah Hawley or a Sam Esmail.  And with a property as wildly ambitious, weird, and unorthodox as "Sandman," you really need someone with some sort of abiding vision to get that across. Goyer and Heinberg strike me as awfully pedestrian for the job.  On the other hand, there's such a thing as too much vision. Witness the glorious mess of Bryan Fuller's first season of "American Gods," adapted from Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel.    

I have to remind myself that different doesn't necessarily mean bad.  I'm sure you could make a perfectly lovely show about Morpheus, Lord of Dreams and personification of the human concept of fantasy, solving mysteries and fighting crime.  It's more likely that we'll see some variation on the superhero action movie template, which would be perfectly fine. "Preludes and Nocturnes" becomes a fairly typical fetch quest story without too much tinkering, and features a decent villain.  So does the second big arc, "The Doll's House." Even watered down and rejiggered to be more appealing to the mainstream, like the "Preacher" and "The Walking Dead" adaptations have been, this kind of take on "Sandman" could be a lot of fun to watch.  

However, the parts of "Sandman" that I'd really love to see onscreen are the parts that don't fit comfortably into any formula.  It's the issues like "Three Septembers and a January," which is a loving biography of a nineteenth century madman. Or "Facade," about a superhero who has become a shut-in.  Or "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which stages the Shakespeare play and fills the audience with real, dangerous faeries. The series became as much an anthology as a serialized work toward the end, full of dozens and dozens of wildly different kinds of fantastical stories.  And it'll be impossible to do that justice. And I know I'm bound to be disappointed.

Still, in spite of myself, I'm really excited about the Netflix "Sandman."  It'll be at least two years until we see so much as a promotional image, but I've spent the last few days scouring Twitter and Reddit and the usual comic book news sites.  I've been reading up again on the past adaptation attempts, and wondering if a feature version with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Corinthian would have been so bad. And, for the umpteenth time, I've been reading my "Sandman" graphic novels, and reminding myself that anything that gets people to pay more attention to the series will ultimately be a good thing.   

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