My guess is that The Sandman is the best comic yet created. I’ve been super excited to see it adapted to film or TV for a long time, and now a Netflix adaptation (of the beginning of the story) exists.

The adaptation is… OK?

There are a lot of fun things about it. And it really nails a few characters, and reinvents a few other characters in ways that make them more awesome and interesting than they were in the original comics. (Though overall I’d say there are more misses than hits on characterization, if we weight by importance.)

I don’t want to discourage people from watching the show (especially if this causes them to read the comics 😛), and I don’t want to say “your enjoyment was wrong!” to people who love the adaptation. I’ve been super delighted to hear people’s positive reviews of the show, and it always makes me happy to hear about which things people found fascinating or moving. I plan to continue watching it myself, and I’m excited to see what comes next. 🙂

But I do think there are several extremely core things about the comics that the Netflix adaptation misses on. So here’s my review of the Sandman TV series, and things I’d change:

(WARNING: The rest of this post will spoil important things about the comics that haven’t happened in the Netflix series yet. Don’t read this post unless you’ve read the Sandman comic series. You might also want to see the TV series before reading on?)

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SPOILERS BELOW

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I’d say there are three core problems with the Netflix series.

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