[COLUMN] Netflix Reduces The Sandman to a Plot Delivery Mechanism | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first stretch of the second season of The Sandman, now streaming on Netflix, particularly concerning what it does and does not adapt from the source material. As with the first season, the show is mostly fine. It is a handsome, stately adaptation that suffers a little from a complete lack of its own identity or perspective on the material. And that is without getting into the baggage the comic’s original writer brings.

The first of three “drops” of the second and final season of Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman arrived this week. Even in what amounts to its first half, it is a very strange season of television that says a lot about storytelling priorities in the modern streaming age.

The first season of The Sandman was a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the classic comic book written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a murderer’s row of talented artists including Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Kelley Jones, Colleen Doran, Matt Wagner and Jill Thompson. The season adapted between one and two issues of the original comic per episode, so that the ten episode season covered the first sixteen issues, with a bonus eleventh episode bringing the total to eighteen.

Given that The Sandman ran for 75 issues between 1988 and 1996, that would suggest a total of four seasons to adapt the entire work at that pace. However, Netflix recently announced that The Sandman will end after this second season, with the eleven episodes covering the remaining 57 issues of the comic book and the twelfth and final episode adapting Gaiman’s three-issue spin-off series Death: The High Cost of Living.

Given the recent accusations leveled against Gaiman, it is easy to imagine that Netflix just wanted to pull the plug on the series. Gaiman is very heavily tied to Sandman. The series’ central character, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), bears a remarkable similarity to Gaiman. Gaiman is credited as co-creator of the television series, and showrunner Allan Heinberg talked a lot in the press about Gaiman’s involvement in the show. Gaiman is a credited co-writer on the show’s final episode.

It is also clear that Sandman didn’t take off for Netflix the way that the streaming giant might have hoped. The company took its time greenlighting a second season, waiting three months after the premiere to make the announcement. The streaming service attempted to launch a spin-off with Dead Boy Detectives, only to cancel it after a single season. It is entirely possible that the decision to wrap up The Sandman over two seasons was driven by commercial rather than creative concerns.

Watching the opening half of the second season, it’s clear that the production budget has been dramatically slashed. There is a lot less location shooting, and many of those locations are recycled. While the first season included guest appearances from British icons like Charles Dance, David Thewlis, Joely Richardson, Stephen Fry and Derek Jacobi, the second season is a lot more modest in how it casts its new characters. There is a sense that a belt has been tightened.

This may not even be a judgment on The Sandman itself, but on the larger cultural context. The streaming glut is over, after all. The era of wild spending has come to an end. These days, a little has to go a long way. There is a clear sense of attrition to the second season of The Sandman, as the twelve episodes are being stretched over three separate drops by Netflix in an effort to prolong the season’s footprint on the service.

Still, series co-creator David S. Goyer has insisted that the decision to wrap up the show after two seasons was made for narrative reasons. “[The ending] was planned more than two years ago,” Goyer explains. “Even though the original comic book run, I think, was 75 issues, we just ended up burning through story faster than we thought we would, because the individual issues, a lot of them, when they were first being published, are only 17 pages.”

This gets at one of the challenges of adapting Sandman, particularly in the streaming age. The comic book is a proper epic. It unfolds over a variety of arcs. Several of these arcs ("Dream Country", "Fables and Reflections", "Worlds' End" and "The Wake") are essentially short story collections, comprised of standalone single-issue stories that tie into the larger themes of the series in indirect and abstract ways. They are often parables and metaphors featuring one-shot characters.

The television adaptation of The Sandman makes the choice to largely ignore those standalone stories. To be fair, the series does adapt some of the vignettes collected in “Dream Country” in the first season, reinforcing the sense that there was a clear change in priorities and direction heading into the second season. However, the series is primarily focused on adapting the larger, more plot-driven arcs of the comic: “Season of Mists”, “Brief Lives”, “The Kindly Ones.”

It is a choice that says a lot about how modern streaming approaches the idea of storytelling, what is important in adapting a piece of media from one medium to another. The second season of Sandman is affirmation that, in the modern media landscape, plot is king. In translating the material from page to screen, priority is given to anything that advances the underlying story of Morpheus as, to quote Gaiman, “the King of Dreams learns he must change, or die, and makes his choice.”

Every story that advances that arc in a literal and direct manner is adapted faithfully, as if the writers are constructing a bridge to reach the series finale in the most direct manner possible. There is a ruthless efficiency to the adaptation. Characters like Loki (Freddie Fox) are introduced largely so they can pay off later, with the expectation that they have a role to play in the endgame. There is a very linear A-to-B-to-C structure to the adaptation. Everything on screen must have some greater utility.

Within this rigid structure, everything that doesn’t push the plot forward is treated as superfluous. It becomes “filler”, in the parlance of the times, and must be jettisoned. It doesn’t matter what those stories tell us about the larger ideas of the series, or how they inform the characters. As David Benioff once boasted to Andy Greenwald, “Themes are for eighth-grade book reports.” These diversions would be distracting and frustrating. They would be a waste of time.

This feels like the perfect expression of the streaming mindset. It is a model that has gamified media consumption so viewers are encouraged to watch at 1.25x or even 1.5x speed to take a more direct hit of their films or shows. The “contentification” of media, the reduction of film and television to shapeless formless “content soup”, has destroyed the idea that an episode of a television show might be enjoyed on its own terms as its own object rather than as an arbitrary section of a larger whole.

The problem is that, in a medium like comic books or television, these diversions are often the point. A viewer could watch a compressed and streamlined version of The X-Files composed entirely of the “mythology” episodes that “matter”, but that would mean skipping many of the show’s best episodes. Similarly, a reader could just pick up the “important” arcs of Sandman, but that would mean missing many of the best bits of the entire series.

Even these seemingly standalone stories serve to buttress and enrich the larger text. Most of the one-shot stories in “Fables and Reflections” are stories of kings and rulers, which obviously resonate with Morpheus’ sense of duty and obligation as ruler of the Dreaming. These standalone stories occasionally introduce important characters who will come into play later, such as Morpheus’ son Orpheus (Ruairí O’Connor).

Many of these individual stories are also beloved. “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, the nineteenth issue of the series, was the only comic to ever win the World Fantasy Award for the Short Story. That victory famously caused such an uproar that the World Fantasy Award created a separate category for comics. The fiftieth issue, “Ramadan”, a commentary on the bombing of Baghdad during the Gulf War, was nominated for an Eisner Award. Sometimes, the filler gives the flavor.

There is a sense that the television show understands these realities. There is a certain clumsiness that results from the ruthless efficiency of this adaptation. The Sandman understands that it has to adapt “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, as a historically important work in the comic book canon. However, it decides to cram it into a ten-minute flashback in “More Devils Than Vast Hell Can Hold”, in the middle of its adaptation of the more “important” “Season of Mists” arc.

Similarly, the character of Orpheus is vitally important to the narrative of “The Kindly Ones”, so the show has to inelegantly compress “The Song of Orpheus” into the middle of “Brief Lives”, literally stopping the plot so that Dream can pause and remember that story for the audience. Similarly, because Orpheus also appears in the comic story “Thermidor”, that gets an abridged adaptation at the start of “Family Blood” at the end of “Brief Lives.”

The deletion of the mostly standalone “A Game of You” arc also creates problems. This may have been a late decision. The first season had seeded “Game of You” characters like Barbie (Lily Travers) and her imaginary friend Martin Tenbones (Lenny Henry). The recasting of Henry as Bernie Capax in “Brief Lives” suggests the show might have originally planned on bringing him back as Tenbones for the sophomore season. However, the arc is completely erased from the season.

While “A Game of You” did not necessarily advance the overarching plot of the comic book, it was hugely important in terms of character and theme. This is quite apparent watching the streaming adaptation. The deletion of “A Game of You” disrupts the flow of the season’s story, leaving the adaptation awkwardly floundering to make up lost ground and to fill in the structural gaps that its absence creates in the larger narrative.

The deletion of “A Game of You” erases the character of Thessaly, whose break-up with Morpheus serves to spur him to accompany Delirium (Esmé Creed-Miles) on her adventure in “Brief Lives.” The show shifts this motivation to Morpheus’ rejection by his former lover Nada (Deborah Oyelade), which serves to simplify Morpheus’ character and undermine the theme of the character’s recurring self-destructive behavior – that Morpheus does the same things over and over.

It also creates an issue with the character of Wanda (Indya Moore), notable as one of the first major transgender characters to appear in mainstream comics. Wanda was a central figure in “A Game of You.” The adaptation clumsily slots her into “Brief Lives” as a way to incorporate her funeral scene into the show. However, without the weight of “A Game of You” behind it, the scene feels leaden and unearned. The sequence forces Morpheus into the role Barbie played in “A Game of You”, standing up for the deceased Wanda, but it’s unconvincing because Morpheus barely knew her.

There is a sense watching the second season of The Sandman of reading a bullet-point summary of the source material, of trying to distill as much plot as possible into the space available with everything else – theme, mood, context, character – reduced to a secondary concern. It’s frustrating, but it is also revealing. It illustrates what is important in this era of “hyper-faithful” adaptations of comic book properties. At times, the show feels like a hugely expensive plot-delivery mechanism.

The Sandman was written as a meditation on stories. It feels oddly fitting that its streaming adaptation should serve as such a perfect distillation of what that medium prioritizes in how it chooses to tell them.