The Sandman producers explain why they changed things from the comics

Netflix’s ambitious live-action adaptation of The Sandman is off to a good start. The series covers the first two volumes of Neil Gaiman’s beloved comic series, “Preludes and Nocturnes” and “The Doll’s House.” People are already calling the series one of the best adaptations they’ve seen, and rightly so. But while it’s certainly faithful to the comics, there are more than a few changes in there.

The Sandman is a genre-hopping saga about a family of anthropomorphic personifications of concepts called the Endless. We follow Dream, who rules the realm we all visit when we fall asleep. Yes, the show is high-concept, but also really, really good.

Speaking to Variety, creator Neil Gaiman and showrunner Allan Heinberg weighed in on some of the book-to-screen changes. Of course, the show can’t be a panel-for-panel recreation of the source material; some things are going to change during the adaptation process. But Heinberg was determined not to clog up the story with new content that we don’t see in the comics:

"The one lesson I feel like I’ve learned over and over again is that we never pad the story. We’ve unstitched the seams in the comics and we’ve told what’s happening off-page and off-panel a lot of the time. But we never pad the stories in order to create more television. We learned the hard way."

If anyone knows about adapting things for the screen, it’s Neil Gaiman. He’s seen lots of his work adapted over the course of his career, from Stardust to Caroline to American Gods to Good Omens. So he was ready for The Sandman. “There were some ungainly scripts were we tried,” Gaiman said. “And then we’d update them and go back to the thing, and somewhere, up in the sky, 26-year-old Neil Gaiman would be smirking at us going, ‘Yeah, see. You experienced writers, you award-winning people; I have nothing and yet I wrote this thing, and you’ve just come back to the thing that I did.'”

So what are some of the things the show changed? Let’s take a look.

Dream vs. Lucifer

Gwendoline Christie is the perfect person to play Lucifer. She’s menacing but still possesses the beauty of a fallen angel. She also towers over Morpheus, which is appropriately intimidating.

In the comics, Dream battles the demon Chorinzon in the Oldest Game, a back-and-forth battle where each character transforms into progressively more deadly foes until one defeats the other. However, the show has Lucifer be the one to face Dream instead. Why the change?

“When you’ve hired Gwendoline Christie because one, she is a Sandman fan and she wants to play Lucifer and you are not going to argue with Gwendoline, and two, because you want her to play Lucifer. She’s 6’3″, 6’6″ in heels, and 7’5″ with wings,” Gaiman said. “And you want her on the stage as much as possible. You go, well, we have this fabulous confrontation here.”

"And we knew from the word go — this was something that was talked about in the initial dinner — that when we were going to be playing The Oldest Game, it was going to be reflected, the stuff that was in the captions was now going to be happening. So you were going to see these things that were being described. If you get the disease, you’re going to be dying of that disease until you come up with your next thing. So why not do it with Lucifer? Why not have Gwendoline be the person who takes that thing — because it’s cooler, because we love her and because she’s on screen."

Moreover, the battle between Dream and Lucifer sets up the events of season 2, as Gaiman explained: “[I]t makes it more personal for her and gets the audience even more invested in ‘Season of Mists.'” That’s one of the next volumes of The Sandman comic, which will follow up directly on Lucifer’s promise to get revenge on Dream.

John Dee’s motivation

The fifth episode of The Sandman, titled “24/7” is easily the most terrifying of the season. We see John Dee (David Thewlis) walk into a diner with Dream’s ruby, which makes dreams come true. As the episode goes on, he manipulates the people at the diner into hurting each other. In doing this, Dee believes he’s removing artifice and saving the world, but in reality, he’s just wrecking havoc.

“We decided very early on to change John’s motivation in ‘The Sandman.’ And so once we did that and decided that John was basically on a heroic mission to save the world with the ruby, you go into the diner through his POV, and you sort of meet all of these people in the middle of their lives, interacting with each other,” Heinberg said.

"And once that decision was made, it just became about falling in love with each of them and giving them hopes and dreams and longings and frustrations and picking apart the lies in their marriages and the lies that they tell themselves. It was incredibly liberating because it was such a departure from the book, for me, as a writer and for Ameni Rozsa, who wrote the first draft of the script, that I felt like once we figured that out, we could do anything."

For the diner episode, the team had the benefit of filming in sequence, which oddly they could do thanks to the pandemic. “I love the fact that because of COVID, you built the diner set and you rehearsed it like a play, which you never get to do on television. You shot it in sequence, which you never get to do,” Gaiman said.

Of course, these aren’t the only changes that occurred throughout the show. There are lots of little ones like as Brute and Glob being replaced by a new nightmare called Gault. Then there’s the absence of all of the DC universe elements; read more on that here.

The Sandman is currently streaming on Netflix!

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