This Saturday, Netflix will reveal info about a lot of its new shows coming later this year, including The Sandman, based on Neil Gaiman's beloved comic book series. The Sandman is about...well, a lot of stuff, but it boils down to a story about an immortal entity named Dream (Tom Sturridge) who rules over the realm of dreams, where we all go when we fall asleep.
The Sandman comics run for 10 volumes, with the first season only covering the first two. And yet, this second season will be the last. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Allan Heinberg said they decided to drill down on Dream's experience specifically, which means cutting a lot of other stories where he only briefly appears.
"That's the entirety of the second season: how to reckon his idea of who he is with who he was to all the people in his life," Heinberg said. "Dream has a very secure narrative about who he is, what his story is, what other people have done to him, and what he's done to them. But he's the hero of that story. In season 2, he realizes, 'Oh! I'm the bad guy in Nada's [Deborah Oyelade] story, I'm the bad guy in Lyta's [Razane Jammal] story, I'm the bad guy in my son's story [Ruairi O'Connor as Orpheus]. And it rocks him."
Heinberg also says that the decision to cut the story short didn't have anything to do with people making sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman, which picked up steam in 2024 and 2025. So far as ending the show early, "[i]t was a decision we made three years ago."
I believe that. I imagine that Netflix looked at the returns from the first season and decided it wasn't worth it to spend the money to adapt the whole of the comic. Although the allegations against Gaiman do make the debut of the second season more awkward.
The Sandman ending early didn't have anything to do with Neil Gaiman
In any case, fans of the comics will see some iconic characters in the second season. That includes Dream's brother Destruction, played by Barry Sloane. That's him in the background in the image above, with Dream's other siblings (from left to write) Desire (Mason Alexander Park), Despair (Donna Preston) and Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles). And then there's an image of Sloane in his Destruction outfit brushing his teeth, cause why not?
While the second season will try to focus on Dream as much as possible, it will adapt one famous Sandman story that's mostly a side adventure: "A Midsummer Night's Dream," about the debut performance writing of Shakespeare's famous play. Apparently actual fairy folk attended the opening, including the mischievous imp Puck. The first image of Puck shows him in a suit, which I'm not sure what to make of; he never wears one in the comics so far as I remember, but in a story as strange as The Sandman, a lot of weird things can happen.
"He brings so much depth to that part," Heinberg said of Gleeson. "He brings sexiness to it and mischief and psychology and heart. I have a tendency to write to the actors playing these parts, and I think our Puck is a very different Puck from the comics, but also from the Puck that I would've written for any other actor."
The Sandman season 2 will release in two volumes: the first six episodes will premiere on Thursday, July 3 with the final five dropping Thursday, July 24.
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