After a failed attempt at a film adaptation, writer Neil Gaiman has shepherded his comic book epic "The Sandman," a stew pot of invented and borrowed mythological characters, into a highly satisfying 10-episode Netflix series. "The great stories will always return to their original forms," Gaiman's eponymous hero will say, and fans of the book should rest assured that the television show — developed by Gaiman with David S. Goyer (the "Blade" trilogy, the "Dark Knight" trilogy) and Allan Heinberg ("Wonder Woman") — will not significantly depart from what Gaiman (and artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, always credited as co-creators) put on the page.
At the center of the story is Dream (Tom Sturridge), aka Morpheus, aka the Sandman, who rules the world of sleep and what goes on there from his CGI kingdom called the Dreaming; he's one of a pack of magical siblings called the Endless whose names all begin with D (Desire, Despair, Destruction, and so on), who in some vague way rule human affairs, even though, like the Greek gods, they seem to spend much of their time not taking care of business or hatching plots against one another.
There are a lot of rules to how this world works, produced by Gaiman as necessary to serve his narrative, but it's better to regard these figures as walking metaphors — "anthropomorphic personifications" in the series' own words — and their antics and universe as a kind of poetry rather than fret over the cosmological mechanics. It's not hard to go with the flow of the story, whether or not you know the original, or its antecedents, or any comics at all, or have ever seen a movie based on one. It's a stand-alone world.
