If you’re looking for a fantasy show to watch on Netflix, you have a lot of options. But if you’re looking for a good fantasy show, you’ll have a harder time. The Witcher started out with a lot of promise, but has since been savaged by fans. Shadow and Bone was looking pretty good for a while, but Netflix canceled it after the second season, long before the story had wrapped up. Heard of Netflix’s Arthurian TV show Cursed? Neither has anyone else.
So Netflix has had some trouble landing this plane, but they did come close once: The Sandman is the best fantasy series on the platform and tells a complete story, even if I wish it had gone on longer.
The Sandman is a wild trip
Myth made manifest
The Sandman is one of those mind-bending TV shows that has a crazy concept that makes sense once you start watching. It’s about a man named Dream (Tom Sturridge), or Morpheus, or Lord Shaper, or a bunch of other things. And actually, he’s not so much a man as he is the anthropomorphic embodiment of the concept of dreams. He’s one of the Endless, a group of seven siblings who all preside over different aspects of the human condition. Dream’s sister Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) escorts people to the next world. His brother Destruction (Barry Sloane) minds how people create and destroy things, and so on.
Dream presides over the Dreaming, the realm where everybody goes when they sleep, and where every myth or story that you’ve ever heard is real. Keeping all of these myths in line takes a lot of work. Dream lives next to Cain from the Bible, who is forever committing fratricide against his brother Abel. At one point, Dream comes into possession of the key to Hell and has to decide which of hundreds of petitioners to turn it over to, and none of the choices are good. The Fates from Greek myth cause him a lot of trouble later in the story, as does a nightmare monster of his own creation called the Corinthian, who has sets of razor-sharp teeth where most of us have eyes.
Through it all, Dream himself remains taciturn, grimly doing his duty until it becomes clear that he’s due for some kind of change. That’s the overarching personal question the show grapples with: is it possible for this eternal, endless being to change, and what does it mean for existence if he does?
The Sandman is fantasy that feels fantastic
Why have only one setting when you can have one hundred?
For a show with so many far-out concepts, The Sandman is easy to watch minute to minute. Yes, Dream is a being so ancient that measuring his life in years is pointless, but he’s also a workaholic who doesn’t make enough time for himself, which is way more relatable. His sisters, Death and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles), are much more down-to-earth and help put him in context. You will learn to like this curmudgeonly over-god.
It also helps that Tom Sturridge does a fantastic job in the lead role. The Sandman is based on a comic book of the same name that ran from the late 1980s through the mid-’90s, and Dream himself was a big part of forming what became the “emo” aesthetic, which showed up in movies like The Matrix and in music through bands like My Chemical Romance. All 2000s-era mall goths owe a debt to The Sandman, whether they know it or not. Strurridge is perfect at channeling the quintessential emo mix of “I am a dark, tortured soul who walks the night forever alone” and “I am a self-pitying basement dweller who should thank his lucky stars he has people in his life willing to get him out of the house every once in a while.” It makes for a performance that’s moving, funny, and even weirdly nostalgic if you’re a viewer of a certain age.
And Netflix gives the cast and crew the resources they need to make Dream’s story as spectacular as it should be. We see the full splendor of the Dreaming and the blasted, ashy wastes of Hell. There are long stretches set in the distant past, like one episode set in Ancient Greece, where we get to know Dream’s son, Orpheus (yes, the one from the myth), and another set in Reign of Terror-era France. The Sandman has the wherewithal to do it all, and you never know where it’s going to take you next or what tone it’s going to explore.
The Sandman was cut short, but still finishes the story
That’s more than Netflix allows a lot of its shows
When Netflix first started work on The Sandman, all of Hollywood was bathing in the post-Game of Thrones glow, when every streamer was willing to throw tons of money at big-name fantasy properties. A few years later, those streamers had rethought their strategies, and The Sandman ended after only two seasons.
The show does have to skip over a bunch of the source comics, but it fits in everything pertinent to Dream, whose story has a definitive end. In some alternate reality, there’s a version of The Sandman that ran for another couple of seasons and got into more of the side content from the comics, but what we got is imaginative, funny, scary, dense, and complete.
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Controversy
I have to mention that The Sandman comics are written by Neil Gaiman, who came under fire for numerous inappropriate abuses of power around the time The Sandman show was coming out. With that in mind, it might have been for the best that the series wrapped up a little sooner than expected, so as not to give Gaiman any more attention.
But Gaiman’s behavior doesn’t take away from all the hard work the cast and crew put into this show, which is an ambitious fantasy on a scale we rarely see and may not see again for a while, as the genre goes out of fashion in Hollywood. There are a lot of great fantasy shows out there to watch, and I count The Sandman as one of the most criminally undersung.
- Release Date
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2022 – 2025-00-00
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Allan Heinberg
- Directors
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Louise Hooper, Andrés Baiz, Hisko Hulsing, Mike Barker, Coralie Fargeat
- Writers
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Neil Gaiman, Allan Heinberg, David S. Goyer
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Tom Sturridge
Morpheus / Dream
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Boyd Holbrook
The Corinthian
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Vivienne Acheampong
Lucienne
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Patton Oswalt
Matthew the Raven
