Netflix’s Sandman show will be set closer to our time

Neil Gaiman wrote Sandman, the phantasmagoric comic about a group of immortal beings called the Endless, between 1989 and 1996, and almost immediately, there was interest in turning it into a movie. “I said, ‘Please don’t’,” Gaiman recalled telling a producer in the early ’90s. “I’m writing the comic. If there was a movie right now it would just screw everything up.'”

There were attempts to adapt Sandman to the big screen up through 2016, but in the wake of the success of epic, expensive, serialized stories like Game of Thrones, the time feels right to put it on TV where it always belonged. And indeed, Netflix has picked up the rights. “I had spent 2016 through till the beginning of this year making Good Omens…into television and really understood how it was done and had learned the practicalities and could no longer be baffled by it,” Gaiman explained. Then by all means, get cracking on adapting your masterpiece.

But will Sandman be updated at all for modern audiences? After all, it’s been 30 years since the first issue hit shelves. “The idea is to stay faithful to Sandman, but to do it for now rather than making it a 1980s period piece,” said Gaiman, who’s working on the adaptation with Allan Heinburg and David Goyer. That means the story is going to take place in 2019, rather than in the ’80s and early ’90s.

"In Sandman [issue] number one, there is a sleeping sickness that occurs because Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, is captured … in 1916, and in 1988 he escapes.  Instead of him being a captive for about 80 years, he’s going to be a captive for about 110 years and that will change things."

Of course, saying that Sandman is “set” in any one time period is kind of misleading. The story goes all over the place, with Dream visiting everyone from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare. And even the parts set in “modern times” are pretty out there, with the characters spending a lot of time in the Dreaming — a realm of imagination populated by all manner of impossible creatures — and dealing with serial killers with mouths for eyes…that kind of thing. So I guess imagine all of that, but with smartphones.

I haven’t said much about what Sandman involves, but in my defense it’s kinda hard to summarize. Dream and his siblings — Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Delirium and Destiny — are all personifications of ideas…I think. They all have responsibilities in their realms, and some of them take their jobs more seriously than others. Dream, whom Gaiman describes as “a gloomy sort of bugger,” takes his more seriously than most, which is just one of his many problems. “He’s not quite human, but he does have absolute standards and responsibilities and tries to fulfil his moral obligations even if his standards are not human.”

Just read it. You’ll get it. It’s pretty good. Then you can join me in lobbying for Adam Driver to play Dream.

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h/t CBC Radio