The potential of The Sandman is visible in almost every frame; the trick is how to turn that dream into reality.
—the most successful episode of the first season by some distance—where Tom Sturridge’s Dream is talking to his sister, Death , and it becomes immediately apparent that, for all his power and fearsomeness, he’s still a sulky little teenager when he’s talking to anyone in his family.
Unfortunately, that moment of recognition—the feeling that what’s onscreen is a note-perfect recreation of the original in a different medium—isn’t something that the rest of the series can sustain.
Although the show’s creators obviously made changes—most evidently in the first five episodes, which were reconstructed to excise elements tied to the Justice League and other DC heroes —there’s a sense throughout the season that Neil Gaiman’s scripts were the one true gospel. As enchanting as his words can be, this happens again and again, even when the show’s credibility is at stake. It brings to mind the: “You can type this shit, but you can’t say it! Move your mouth while you’re typing.
Similarly, the pacing of the show suffers from a fidelity to its source material. Sure, it took an entire issue for Dream to visit Hell to regain his helm, but a 24-page comic book and a 50-minute television episode are different beasts, and that’s a tension felt throughout the season. It’s not a coincidence that the sixth episode feels so much livelier and dynamic; it brings two entirely separate issues together to form something new.
If the show’s dedication to Gaiman’s writing is a flaw, so is the fact that it doesn’t share a desire to remain just as faithful to the comic book’s visuals. There are certain moments where particular panels are purposefully recreated on the screen—Sam Kieth’s artwork from the first issue, especially, gets a lot of attention in the opening episode—but taken as a whole, the show feels more generic and more colorless than what comic book artists created three decades earlier.
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