The first episode mainly follows Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance), a wealthy English magician who believes he can capture Death and force them to bring his dead son back to life.

But as soon as we’re told most dreams can’t survive in the waking world, it’s clear these are rules made to be broken - and wouldn’t you know it, one soon breaks. Others venture off with his chosen staffers. Dream creates and controls dreams and nightmares. The place they visit when sleeping, dully called The Dreaming, plays just as consequential a role in their lives, and he’s in charge of keeping it in order. Getting right to the exposition, “The Sandman” starts with Dream (first introduced as the The King of Dreams) informing his audience of “mortals” that the world they “insist on calling the real world” is only half of their existence. (Though this is another production with too many scenes set in big, flat, open spaces, where CGI can be easily conjured for a bland kind of grandeur.) But anyone yet to be converted may grow tired of sifting through all this glimmering sand for greater meaning - or, you know, any sort of genuine feeling. For die-hard fans, simply seeing Gaiman’s stoic drawings spring to life may be reason enough to sit through 10 hours of a dream long held and finally realized. “The Sandman,” which runs a teaser-trailer after the first episode as if it knows the initial hour offers little reason to keep watching, comes across similarly empty - all promise, little payoff. ‘Succession’ Review: Episode 8 Makes Us Watch as the Poison Drips Throughĭesire is another character, by the way, played by Mason Alexander Park, but they’re less relevant to what happens here than as a tease for future seasons.

His ambitions change as frequently as his established beliefs, seemingly steered more by the need to introduce Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie), Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), and Constantine (Jenna Coleman) than any consistent internal wants or desires. Dream himself (played by Tom Sturridge) is little more than a tour guide. Certain stories feel episodic, yet rarely fill an entire hour, while the ongoing plot - led by Dream, aka Morpheus, aka Master of Dreams, aka The Sandman - is scattered and shifting. Goyer and Allan Heinberg), is tasked with introducing the streaming service’s massive (though slightly shrinking) audience to its elaborate fantasy world, filled with mythical characters who rule and roam their given realms yet live within a shared, ever-expanding universe.Īs if edifying the masses about the secret significance of our slumber wasn’t tricky enough, the first season can’t settle on a simple structure. The Netflix series, based on Neil Gaiman’s award-winning comic books and adapted by the author himself (alongside David S. Like an enormous hourglass with two wobbly ends, “ The Sandman” never finds its balance.

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