Neil Gaiman

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Review: The Sandman S2 is a classic tragedy, beautifully told

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I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman, the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s influential graphic novel series (of which I am longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming.  It’s been a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream’s story to its inevitably tragic, yet satisfying, end.

(Spoilers below; some major S2 reveals after the second gallery. We’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

When Netflix announced in January that The Sandman would end with S2, speculation abounded that this was due to sexual misconduct allegations against Gaiman (who has denied them). However, showrunner Allan Heinberg wrote on X that the plan had long been for there to be only two seasons because the show’s creators felt they had only enough material to fill two seasons, and frankly, they were right. The first season covered the storylines of Preludes and Nocturnes and A Doll’s House, with bonus episodes adapting “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “Calliope” from Dream Country.

The S2 source material is drawn primarily from Seasons of Mists, Brief Lives, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake, weaving in relevant material from Fables and Reflections—most notably “The Song of Orpheus” and elements of “Thermidor”—and the award-winning “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” from Dream Country. This season’s bonus episode adapts the 1993 standalone spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. All that’s really missing is A Game of You—which focuses on Barbie (a minor character introduced in A Doll’s House) trying to save her magical dream realm from the evil forces of the Cuckoo—and a handful of standalone short stories. None of that material has any bearing on the Dream King’s larger character arc, so we lose little by the omissions.

Making amends

After escaping his captors, regaining his talismans, tracking down the rogue Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), and dealing with a Vortex, S2 finds Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) rebuilding the Dreaming, which had fallen into disrepair during his long absence. He is interrupted by his sibling Destiny’s (Adrian Lester) unexpected summons to a family meeting, including Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston), and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles).

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Good Omens will wrap with a single 90-minute episode

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The third and final season of Good Omens, Prime Video’s fantasy series adapted from the classic 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, will not be a full season after all, Deadline Hollywood reports. In the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Gaiman this summer, the streaming platform has decided that rather than a full slate of episodes, the series finale will be a single 90-minute episode—the equivalent of a TV movie.

(Major spoilers for the S2 finale of Good Omens below.)

As reported previously, the series is based on the original 1990 novel by Gaiman and the late Pratchett. Good Omens is the story of an angel, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), and a demon, Crowley (David Tennant), who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon. Gaiman’s obvious deep-down, fierce love for this project—and the powerful chemistry between its stars—made the first season a sheer joy to watch. Apart from a few minor quibbles, it was pretty much everything book fans could have hoped for in a TV adaptation of Good Omens.

S2 found Aziraphale and Crowley getting back to normal, when the archangel Gabriel (Jon Hamm) turned up unexpectedly at the door of Aziraphale’s bookshop with no memory of who he was or how he got there. The duo had to evade the combined forces of Heaven and Hell to solve the mystery of what happened to Gabriel and why.

In the cliffhanger S2 finale, the pair discovered that Gabriel had defied Heaven and refused to support a second attempt to bring about Armageddon. He hid his own memories from himself to evade detection. Oh, and he and Beelzebub (Shelley Conn) had fallen in love. They ran off together, and the Metatron (Derek Jacobi) offered Aziraphale Gabriel’s old job. That’s when Crowley professed his own love for the angel and asked him to leave Heaven and Hell behind, too. Aziraphale wanted Crowley to join him in Heaven instead. So Crowley kissed him and they parted. And once Aziraphale got to Heaven, he learned his task was to bring about the Second Coming.

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Dead Boy Detectives turns Neil Gaiman’s ghostly duo into “Hardy Boys on acid”

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Solving paranormal mysteries with panache —

Supernatural horror detective series has witches, demons, and a charming Cat King.

–

Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) are the Dead Boy Detectives, ghosts who solve paranormal mysteries.

Enlarge / Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) are the Dead Boy Detectives, ghosts who solve paranormal mysteries.

Netflix

For those eagerly anticipating the second season of Netflix’s stellar adaption of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels, Dead Boy Detectives—the streaming plaform’s new supernatural horror detective series—is a welcome return to that weird magical world. Co-showrunner Steve Yockey (Supernatural), who created the series, aptly describes it as “the Hardy Boys on acid.” You’ve got vengeful witches, demons, psychic mediums, cursed masks, foul-mouthed parasitic sprites, talking cats—and, of course, the titular ghostly detectives, intent on spending their afterlife cracking all manner of mysterious paranormal cases.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Sandman fans first encountered the Dead Boys in the “Seasons of Mist” storyline, in which the ghost Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland meet for the first time in 1990. Edwin had been murdered at his boarding school in 1916 and spent decades in Hell. When Lucifer abandoned his domain, Hell was emptied, and Edwin was among the souls who returned to that boarding school. Charles was a living student whom Edwin tried to protect. Charles ultimately died and chose to join Edwin in his afterlife adventures. The characters reappeared in the Children’s Crusade crossover series, in which they decided to become detectives.

“As far as I was concerned, this was obviously the ultimate, the finest, most commercial idea I had ever had: two dead boys and a detective agency, you’re there,” said Gaiman during a virtual media event. “Nobody else saw it. It was just this mad conviction that sooner or later, there would be somebody out there in the world who would pick up one of these comics, read it, and see the same thing. Little did I know that baby Steve Yockey was out there waiting to be infected.”

Yockey championed the project from the start. “I fell in love with the comic when I was very young and I was going through a personal loss, and I found it weirdly comforting in a psychedelic way,” he said. It’s thanks to Yockey that the Dead Boys popped up in a S3 episode of Doom Patrol when he was a writer on that series. The characters proved so popular that HBO Max ordered a pilot for a Dead Boy Detectives series in 2021. The project subsequently moved to Netflix. Per the official premise:

Meet Edwin Paine (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), “the brains” and “the brawn” behind the Dead Boy Detectives agency. Teenagers born decades apart who find each other only in death,  Edwin and Charles are best friends, ghosts… who solve mysteries. They will do anything to stick together—including escaping evil witches, Hell and Death herself. With the help of a clairvoyant named Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) and her friend Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), they are able to crack some of the mortal realm’s most mystifying paranormal cases.

“I knew the things I wanted to hang onto in the adaptation were the relationship between the boys and Death, because that drives our action, and also this sense of, don’t wait until you’re looking death in the face to start living,” said Yockey. For his co-showrunner, Beth Schwartz, it was the close friendship between Edwin and Charles, forged out of their painful pasts, that cemented her love for the series. “It’s this horrible tragedy when you really think about it,” she said. “It’s these two boys who didn’t get to live past their teenage years. But because of that tragedy they created this amazing friendship.”

The Dead Boys came out of the Sandman canon, but that series was at Netflix, while Yockey was initially developing Dead Boy Detectives for HBO Max, So Gaiman and Yockey essentially “filed off the Sandman serial numbers” for their early scripts, per Gaiman. When the series moved to Netflix, the streaming platform’s only request was to set the story back in the Sandman universe. Charles and Edwin are evading Death to solve mysteries in their afterlife, so naturally, Kirby Howell-Baptiste makes a cameo in a pilot scene penned by Gaiman, reprising her role as Death. One other Endless makes an appearance late in the season, and eagle-eyed fans might spot nods to the original Sandman artwork in the set design.

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