7 ms·
How (and Why) Neil Gaiman Finally Adapted ‘The Sandman’ for TV
- htk 4y agoSeveral complaints online about "forced diversity" on the casting, many relating it to Netflix's influences.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- greymalik 4y agoGaiman has been pretty vocal [1] about his support for the casting: “Desire's nonbinary identification is so textual that one supporter asked Gaiman if he thought critics of these castings had even read The Sandman. "I don't think so, no," the author responded. When another asked, "Wasn't Desire… always non-binary…??," Gaiman replied, "Well, yes. But you'd have to have read the comics to know that. And the shouty people appear to have skipped that step.” [1] https://ew.com/tv/neil-gaiman-defends-the-sandman-casting-nonbinary-and-black-actors/ https://ew.com/tv/neil-gaiman-defends-the-sandman-casting-no...
- tialaramex 4y agoI'm going to guess that a bunch of people don't like the choice for Death. But the thing about Death is that she's such the archetype that from then until now you could never move at a goth club for all the women who are sure they're Death. Like, try announcing from the DJ booth, "Has anybody lost a silver ankh?" and watch like two dozen women glance down between their boobs to check theirs is still hanging around their neck. In the comic book you can just draw a goth chick, and a million women say "That's me" and you move on. But if you actually cast any of the women who'd like to think that's them it's not going to make anybody happy. She ceases to be "Everyman" well, every-goth-chick and becomes a specific individual. So I think you probably specifically don't want to cast Death for resemblance to that image, much more than his other siblings. Actually I'd be tempted to cast Brad Pitt, and be like yeah what? But Brad is a bit old and a bit expensive, and that involves rewriting some stuff, so, sure, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, why not? Personally I think Brad's accent would have thrown me off more than Kirby not having pasty white skin.
- kleer001 4y agoHuge fan of the comics since they were released and have bought both seasons of the audio dramas and my only complaint is the apparent older age and no-fun-ness of Death in the trailers. I thought the original author's intention was to have a young and indefatigable character play the embodiment of the end of all things as a light irony and existential cotton candy balance to the grim reality of the job. But I'll hold my real opinion until I see the whole show. If I don't hear a bubbly "Peachy-keen!" I'll probably just sigh and roll my eyes. It's only TV. If I want the old thing I'll just reread the comics again.
- tptacek 4y agoDeath is the most faithfully adapted character in the whole show, so if someone's complaining about that, they're telling on themselves. They nailed Death. I was pleasantly surprised by that; there's a (somewhat well-regarded) audiobook adaptation of the books, with James McAvoy as Morpheus and Kat Dennings (the older daughter in 40 Year Old Virgin, and, by appearances, a straight-out-of-central-casting choice for Death), and Death does not work at all in it.
- taeric 4y agoI've enjoyed both. Curious what makes the audio not work for you.
- brazzy 4y agoI really don't think it's Desire anyone is annoyed about, and using that as an example to dismiss the criticism only weakens the dismissal. Lucifer... sure, he's canonically without genitals anyway and decidedly uninterested in things like gender norms - and I'm actually excited to see Gwendolyn Christie portray the character. Casting a black woman as Death goes directly against Gaiman's explicitly stated concept of how he imagined the character, and while she wears many guises, it seems wrong to just break the visual similarity (paleness) between the Endless. I really, really hope the actress can transport the character's essence (IMO first and foremost a kind of universial compassion and humor) sufficiently to make it not matter. And then Lucien as a black woman... was that really necessary? At some point it just feels forced.
- falcolas 4y agoLucifer is the only casting so far that hasn’t resonated with me. She felt more like a corporate CEO than fallen angel. And the stereotypical bat wings… meh The rest have done really well, even Death (who I didn’t get good vibes from in the lead up). EDIT: Despair didn’t do much for me either. More emo teen than avatar of suffering.
- cgrealy 4y agoGaiman has publicly stated that he loves the actress as Death. Someone then complained about disrespecting the artist and the model, and the artist responded he loved it too (the model has passed, but the artist, who was a close friend, said she would have loved it as well). I did watch that clip from The Sound of Her Wings, and I thought she nailed the kindness aspect of Death. I do hope we'll also get some of fun, hopeful aspects too, but I haven't got t othose episodes yet.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cgrealy 4y agoOh and Lucien as a black woman... I ask why not? How does it hurt the character? The actor playing Lucien is is perfectly fine, so why not add some more diversity to the cast?
- simonh 4y agoHave any of these people actually read the graphic novels? They’re chock full of trans, non-binary, race swapping characters. Playing with the fluidity of identity is a persistent theme.
- powerhour 4y agoIt doesn't matter. If anyone outside the "norm" is included, a group of folks online will be angry about it. They're a minority and can safely be ignored (and probably about other topics as well).
- Kaze404 4y agoThere are two genders: "man" and "political" /s
- goto11 4y agoPresumably complaint by people who haven't read the comic?
- throwaway24532 4y ago
- snoopy_telex 4y agoI really hope that he can leverage any success in getting American Gods a final season. It deserved a ending
- no_wizard 4y agoI always felt it needed a different network that would be more willing to take more risks, like HBO
- echelon 4y agoHBO, now under control of cost-cutting Discovery+ executives, may not be taking risks for much longer. Twitter is abuzz with insiders stating that the CEO doesn't like the cost or margins of "appointment viewing" and would prefer Discovery+'s more inexpensive, reality-based "comfort viewing". It sounds like HBO is going to start sucking.
- Consultant32452 4y agoHBO just got gutted. https://www.cbr.com/report-hbo-max-faces-scripted-content-gutting-staff-reduction/ https://www.cbr.com/report-hbo-max-faces-scripted-content-gu...
- polotics 4y agoI came to Sandman expecting something approaching the early seasons of American Gods, was sorely disappointed. The storytelling is fine in Sandman, but the lack of graphic flamboyance really takes it somewhere else than where I hoped. Tale of the lost psychedelia I guess: what's on screen is readable TV, stable clear shots, not the focused freedom of the graphic novels.
- nottorp 4y agoWell, the trouble with American Gods is they streeeetched the original material so much that I stopped watching somewhere at the beginning of the 2nd season. Felt like the Hobbit - if you cut off 2/3 of it it may be a great movie but as it is it's a bore.
- metroholografix 4y ago> Sources say Goyer was also adamant that “The Sandman” not be “dumbed-down” and that it be “kept weird,” and any attempts to make it “formulaic” were rejected by Goyer and Gaiman. That's funny since I found it formulaic to the extreme, which is a shame. Being a fan of the comics, I was saddened by the potential that was squandered in this adaptation. Regardless of what Gaiman says, I can't see this series as anything else than yet another cookie-cutter commoditized dumbed-down corporate-approved offering designed for mass-consumption. It's more of the same mind-numbingly "safe" and soulless material that Netflix is so good at. At least Alan Moore had the courage to tell Hollywood where to go.
- arthurcolle 4y agoI thought it was a pretty good adaptation! What didn't you like about it?
- metroholografix 4y agoThe comic was transformative and iconoclastic. It made you think but also forged new ground in graphic storytelling (and let's not forget that the artists that worked on it were at least as important if not more so than Gaiman). There is none of that in this adaptation. It plays it safe on every possible level. One can easily imagine the corporate bean counters slapping Gaiman on the back, a firm nod of approval.
- BugsJustFindMe 4y agoMaybe you're right, but I have no way to tell from your comments, because both of them are very generic. A lot of handwaving dismissal, but not actually describing any of the aggrieved wrongness. Lobbing "formulaic" but not giving a formula, "safe" but not explaining the safety. What you've done is, ironically, formulaic and safe. Statements that fit well into the typical potshot pattern of people on the internet wanting to turn "I don't like" into some objective truth about the work, with a smattering of "everyone knows Netflix corp yada yada", without having enough detail to put your own preferences at risk.
- wyldfire 4y agoI don't read a ton of fiction, but I absolutely love everything I've read by Gaiman. I haven't read "The Sandman" yet, but I'm pretty optimistic about the show based on everything else I've read.
- tialaramex 4y agoThe Sandman is a weird thing to have missed. I guess you got into him after he started writing novels? Sandman is in my opinion Gaiman's best long form work, but for my money his best single issue is probably from his (likely now never to be finished although they do keep teasing, most recently for this October) Miracleman run. "Winter's Tale" from the Golden Age of Miracleman is doing something comic books aren't allowed to do, even more so than when he wrote Sandman. Winter is far more powerful than her father, and so the story ought to not work because what are the stakes? Introducing some "big bad" that could hurt Winter ruins the flow of the rest of the comic, and yet without such a threat why should we care about her tale? Gaiman sidesteps that by telling it as a children's story, like Judth Kerr's "The Tiger Who Came To Tea". In this form the story within a story can break all the rules. Masterful. And then the outer envelope story continues the Golden Age theme of humans living in a utopia still being humans.
- wyldfire 4y ago> The Sandman is a weird thing to have missed. I guess you got into him after he started writing novels? I like graphic novels ("1602" was excellent!) but when I started to look through Gaiman's catalog for new stuff to read, "The Sandman" seemed a bit epic and not as easily digestable as novels and short stories.
- da-bacon 4y ago-_
- fritztastic 4y agoFWIW, (in my opinion) it does seem like a "not-bad" adaptation. It's not a disaster, and I've enjoyed it so far. I don't think there would ever be a perfect time or a perfect way to adapt the source material, but I am very glad Gaiman was involved and it has been made into a series instead of someone trying to condense it into a film (even with the prospect of expanding into sequels). I think it does contain a lot of the important themes, but is missing some of the vibes- probably because the setting of the comics took place in a very 80s/90s reality. Though there are branching storylines sprinkled in different times. I haven't finished watching the episodes, but it seems like a decent adaptation- it's good, not. I think it's missing something, though I'd have to read the comics again to articulate precisely what that is. Then again, it is no easy feat to translate the comics into a video medium- and I'm happy to be able to watch the story, so I do have that bias.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago> it seems like a decent adaptation- it's good, not. What are you trying to say? Good not great?
- mark_l_watson 4y agoI have watched the first three episodes so far and like it. I never followed Gaiman's comic strip Sandman, so I did 10 minutes of web browsing and reading before starting. I also watched part of an interview with Gaiman on YouTube about the new series.
- kuramitropolis 4y agoFrom what I bore to watch, it's a quite faithful adaptation - even if somewhat simplified. As someone who only read a bunch of those 80s/90s "transgressive" comic books in the late 2000s-early 2010s, thanks to the wonders of the Web (and never saw any sign of anyone else having heard of these particular works in my godforsaken corner of the world, though Gaiman is somewhat known for his collabs with Pratchett), I could draw comparison with "Preacher" and "The Boys" (based on the eponymous works by Garth Ennis), which seem to be doing the whole "comic book to TV show because we bought off all the counterculture and are consequently running out of interesting intellectual property" thing a bit better. Taking more liberties with the source material, too; adding stuff that wasn't in the book but bears the original spirit. Interestingly enough, those are also more grittier and less "politically correct" tales - even though their protagonists also tend to espouse enlightened views of radical acceptance, and the underlying message seems to be that the real antagonist is not just some entrenched establishment of crooked power mongers, but the mass of NPCs who enable them. Guess violence is timeless and magical realism is only relevant in the context of specific historical moments of cultural transition - who would've known? Of course, there's comparatively less of that particular conflict overtly represented in the Sandman - it's one of those metaphysical things where most of the action happens in the characters' inner worlds. (Maybe that's why they thought it was such a timeless tale that recasting some of the characters as non-Gothic would be sufficient modernization?) Still, I consider Gaiman's work part of the same campaign of guerilla cultural warfare that was conducted around the turn of the century by teaching the kids lateral thinking, imagination, and of course emotional literacy and compassion. And of course the kids took that and went to become salaried creatives building nostalgic simulacra to mask the terminal disenchantment of the world (no enchantment -> no hope -> workers don't breed). So, yeah, guess we lost that one. Finally got around to reading William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, and boy oh boy does the man have a good handle on how the media machine acts to transform artworks and the human experiences that art glorifies into a uniform bland "concept soup". Guess they'll start shooting shows from his desiccated corpus next. (Heard it here first, folks!) All in all a Constantine/Watchmen tier adaptation. Don't waste time watching it, just torrent the original comic books and enjoy.
- etc-hosts 4y agoSandman compilations are available in all of your favorite physical and online used book store outlets.
- tptacek 4y agoThe issue with this season is that while the comics are beloved, the first book is quite weak; Gaiman was still finding his voice, still experimenting with what the books were going to be, and constrained by editorial requirements from DC. The first several issues are full of cringey tie-ins to other DC IP, and the horror elements are forced (The Sandman is not a horror comic series). If you're not a Sandman stan, my advice is to watch episode 1, and then episode 5, skipping 2-4. The first actually-good episode is 6; the Hob Gadling stuff is sort of emblematic of the the comic grows into, so if you like it, you'll like the rest of it. If you are a Sandman stan, something to note is that they seem to have deliberately severed it from the DC Universe. I'm surprised at how many elements of the first and second book turn out to be been DC tie-ins; for instance, Hector and Lyta Hall in Dolls House were I guess defined by other DC comics? Anyways, they've gone out of their way to cut all that stuff out the series. I think most of the changes are for the better. I think the series is fine. I was way, way into Sandman when I was younger. This show isn't in my Top N list. I'm curious to see if it gets renewed. By comparison, the HBO Watchmen series is not only one of the best comic book adaptations of all time, but also one of my favorite TV series of the last 10 years.
- falcolas 4y agoThe link hasn’t totally been severed. Constantine is still present. My only two gripes are a bad 2.0 sound mix - too much dynamic range, even with compression turned on - and Lucifer was lackluster. Too much “corporate CEO” and not enough fallen angel. Should have pulled in the TV show actor. But Death, Desire, Matthew, Lucien, even Morpheus himself all rock.
- tptacek 4y agoThe Constantine of the series isn't the Constantine of the book; the Constantine of the book is the protagonist of Hellblazer, and he isn't hundreds of years old. The Constantine of the series has a thru-line going back to Hob Gadling; she's entirely contained in the Sandman story.
- falcolas 4y ago
- Maursault 4y agoSince no one mentioned, I was a bit confused. I had heard of the Sandman, had some awareness that it was an oldish popular and well-regarded comic leading to a popular graphic novel. I must have seen imagery of Sandman somewhere. But then I watched the series I was utterly confused by the goth imagery and a lot of other elements. A little research revealed I was certainly confused. The Sandman I had in mind was the original Sandman, Wesley Dodds, a novel creation of Gardner Fox (writer) and Bert Christman (artist) for DC comics, and who's popularity languished in the 1940's, but must have come back into style for (I can find no reference to but have seen) the 1980's graphic novel, large format, grey cover featuring Dodds as the Sandman. The dip in popularity in the 1940's led other creators to steal the name and ideas and use for other unrelated comic characters. But then those characters have been forgotten and Dodds returns, only for Gaiman (also for DC) to capitalize on the popularity of the original Sandman (Dodds) just a few years later by creating the god Sandman (Morpheus), and retconning Wesley Dodds as being given his powers by Morpheus. Science fiction has always been a pioneering genre for fairly representing minorities. But Gaiman turned everything goth, maybe a little steampunk, and gratuitously gay. I don't think there is anything wrong with giving a little of this and a little of that for the various groups of viewers and consumers, especially minorities, but, with a ham fist, Gaiman overindulges, belabors and vastly over-represents alternative lifestyles, who happen to all be white but for a single exception, a black woman. No Finns, no Danes, no Pols, no Hindus, no Japanese, no Filipinos... mostly just gay white male characters, and a couple few black men and women. I don't like to criticize a work in this way, because it is not all that matters, but I am nearly certain that Gaiman intended to shock, and I expect wants discussion on it. My feelings are that gay and lesbian characters were avant garde in the late 1960s, but now they're used kind of like too much ketchup. Everything is drowning in ketchup.
- braingenious 4y ago> But Gaiman turned everything goth, maybe a little steampunk Have you read the comic? It’s very, very goth and steampunk. As for “there are only gay blank women” point… what? There are like three black women in the show for more than an episode or two that I can think of. The main character is a god played by a white guy, the main antagonist is a non-human nightmare played by a white guy, the secondary antagonist (ruby guy) is a white guy, his mom is a notedly straight white woman, Constantine is a write woman, Lucifer is a white woman, and while Stephen Fry may be gay in real life, his character doesn’t really have a sexuality. Aside from Rose Walker, the majority of people that move the story forward are white folks.
- mihaic 4y agoI feel it's ironic to say this for The Sandman, but for me the standard woke changes to the source material hurt the story, as they forced Dream to be a much weaker character. Johanna Constantine for instance starts off rude and dismissive towards Dream, since this is the sort of behavior writers use to telegraph strong female character nowadays -- which ended up making the main character feel weaker when he's not taken seriously. Lucien's change was of no importance to the story, but just threw me off a bit from how I pictured mentally the comics. Episode 6 on the other hand was the highlight of the season as it completely stuck to the source material. Death now being black still felt completely natural, since her personality was the same, and the Endless are not bound to any form. I'm fine with changes made to adapt a work to a new medium, but changes without any reason just confuse me as a fan of the original work, as I'm subconsciously expecting a reason for the change that never comes
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago>Johanna Constantine for instance starts off rude and dismissive towards Dream, since this is the sort of behavior writers use to telegraph strong female character nowadays -- which ended up making the main character feel weaker when he's not taken seriously.[..] This. Exactly! Jenna Coleman plays Joanna Constantine in Netflix’s Sandman. I really disliked her in Dr.Who because it became the Clara Oswald Show… I couldn’t bear to watch her repeat the same shtick in Sandman too.
- foxes 4y agoYou will consume latest comic book superhero media citizen.
- norwalkbear 4y agoMoney