Nettlix’s The Sandman is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, having achieved an 89% Tomatometer score, with forty-five reviews having been submitted. Sandman is the long-awaited adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s famous comic series, which as been lingering in development limbo for decades. Now That Sandman is here, there’s certainly a lot riding on it – both in terms of providing a show that hardcore fans of The Sandman comic will appreciate, and attracting a mainstream viewer audience. And Netflix’s version of Sandman has to do it all without the benefit of those DC Universe connections.
Neither sweet dream nor horrifying nightmare, Netflix’s The Sandman, the long-gestating adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s legendary DC Comics series, is more of an afternoon nap, the kind that unintentionally whiles away an afternoon: initially pleasant, but then it just … keeps going. After the season’s visually ambitious and ominously tense first half, the pacing slows and the narrative flow stagnates until you feel like you just woke up on the couch with bleary eyes, a fuzzy mouth, and the rest of The Sandman already half-forgotten.
Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) may offer “freedom and adventure” to his mortal visitors, but The Sandman doesn’t entirely hold up its end of the bargain. That reneged promise is tied primarily to the series’ treatment of Dream, who goes by many names over these ten episodes – Morpheus, the Oneiromancer, and of course, the titular Sandman – but never seems fully fleshed out. And without a strong sense of Dream and his motivations, all the stories and characters revolving around him suffer, too.
