It has taken 30 years for an adaptation of The Sandman (Netflix), Neil Gaiman’s celebrated comic-book series, to make it to the screen, and little wonder. It is a big, bold story of gods and demons, so deep and rich that the idea of cramming its wonders into 10 episodes seems borderline ludicrous. Yet this is the era of megabudget fantasy television, with the imminent arrival of a small-screen Lord of the Rings and the return of the Game of Thrones universe in House of the Dragon. With its debut season, The Sandman can stand proudly among them, albeit as their moody goth older brother.
The first couple of episodes exist firmly in the realm of fantasy. The notes I took when watching include “Patton Oswalt is crow?”. It’s that kind of show, and it immerses you in its world immediately, setting the Sandman off on his journey of discovery. It begins in 1916, when Lord Morpheus, or Dream, or the Sandman, or Lord Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, to give him his pedigree name (a sinewy Robert Smith type, played with breathy sulkiness by Tom Sturridge), is mistakenly captured by Charles Dance’s sinister – and Dance is very good at sinister – magus.
