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There was only ever Death - The Sandman (8/5/2022)


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I think I'm probably one of the people who bagged on the idea of this series the most, but Neil Gaiman apparently got to take good care of his baby this time. I've avoided trailers and all that as much as possible, because it's been so long since I read it start-to-finish that it'll be fairly new. Mason Park looks GREAT as Desire, and they're doing The Doll's House this year, so at least one of the best stories will get covered even if Netflix craps the bed.

Besides, if The Boys gets a thread, so should this.

Who else is excited?

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3 episodes down and, yeah, this is really good.

I'm not *loving* it, per se, but I think that could be because I know the material and I don't know if there could be a better marriage of medium and story than the original. But they did this as right as they could. The casting is close to impeccable. Sturridge is WAAAAY better than I expected. If there's anyone disappointing, it might be Boyd Holbrook as the Corinthian, which is admittedly a bad role to whiff on, but he's too likable and delivers his lines too fast.

It does a good job of pitching the DC-specific continuity points overboard and filling them so you don't think you're missing anything. But I wonder how this plays to anyone unfamiliar with the source.

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I’m through the Preludes & Nocturnes arc.

Thus far I’d say it’s a perfect example of how you can “faithfully” adapt a story while totally failing to capture what was special about the story in its original form.

Its fine, in a frustrating sort of way.

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I finished it tonight and will probably watch it again before I can Netflix for another 6 months.

It is reeeeeeeeeeeally talky in an irritating way at times, as Dream explains everything straight into the fucking ground.  You'd almost think Basil Exposition from Austin Powers was going to show up in the Dreaming.  But the casting is still something else, and Holbrook kinda won me over by the end, as his portrayal was like a funhouse mirror of Pinocchio, full of rage and self-loathing that he couldn't be a real boy.

If you watch "The Sound of Her Wings" and the room doesn't get dusty, you're hopeless, and all the people who think Death needed to be some tiny Asian chick can fuck all the way off; Kirby Howell-Baptiste might be the highlight of the whole show, so it's too bad she's only in the one ep.

They did a nice job weaving stuff together, too, since this covered a lot of different storylines in one pass.  I'm sure they'll pull off the same next season.  I hope they have the nerve to do something really cool like start with "Dream of a Thousand Cats" as an opener for A Game of You or Season of Mists (or both - really both since Game of You is such a divisive storyline among fans anyway) in the way that Death's section dovetailed into Hob's.

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Slow watching, so only up to Ep 3. Eagerly awaiting the diner episode, as Thewlis will probably be amazing. Will miss Joey Richardson, as she was great. 

sad to see Jenna Coleman’s acting has not improved for me since being in Doctor Who. 

Don’t know if they will give Matthew a new backstory. Did Matt Cable ever show up on the most recent Swamp Thing atl show? 
 

nitpicks aside, it’s at least a refreshing change from the D+ MCU TV formula.

 

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I asked one of the MCU/comic reading guys at work if he had watched it yet and he had never heard of it. 
 

on the whole, I thought it was decent, quibbles aside, will prob save in depth thoughts for the pod. One of my friends from college who read it when I did back in the day wants to come on the show and talk about it. 

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I have zero exposure to the comic.  In fact, my only exposure to The Sandman is the t-shirt his namesake in ECW would wear sometimes.

Anyway, I liked the first episode. I'm going to stick with it. Looks fun.

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Four episodes in and it's pretty good. Wish Coleman would have been just a bit less likable. Thewlis is fantastic. I really didn't like the hell depiction in episode 4. It was all too sparse and overly serious. I get why they streamlined things but I'm not sure I want streamlined Sandman. The idea of hell as a lounge may have been more poignant in 1989 but this was just barren and boring.

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Yeah, the Hell ep was way too flat, almost generic, like you'd see 15 other movies that did a better job with that depiction just by picking them out of a hat; that section of it might have been one of the only times where I felt really let down by how they handled something.  I also didn't care for the CGI for the end of "24/7".  It may be comics-aligned, but it looked hokey instead of menacing. 

Just hope they treat this better than Mindhunter or Altered Carbon.

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Just wow. The 1-2 punch of the Diner episode and the Death episode, probably the best 2 hours of TV I've watched in 2022. Doubted the show coming in (as one of these people who discovered the comic in his late teens and became obsessed with it) but it has been a joy - not afraid to let things breathe and go at its own pace, for better or worse commercially speaking.

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1 hour ago, Custos said:

Just wow. The 1-2 punch of the Diner episode and the Death episode, probably the best 2 hours of TV I've watched in 2022. Doubted the show coming in (as one of these people who discovered the comic in his late teens and became obsessed with it) but it has been a joy - not afraid to let things breathe and go at its own pace, for better or worse commercially speaking.

We just did that last night. I was really happy with the death episode as the Hob story might be my favorite in the whole series and it transferred well to TV. I didn’t think the diner episode worked quite as well if only because it lost something by losing the framing devices comics allow. The “Hour One”, “Hour Two” structure. Plus things devolved more quickly and more chaotically in the comic in a way that always stuck with me. Sometimes it’s hard to escape the source material.

Edited by Matt D
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I like the show, but I think it has some serious flaws as a TV series. If I were a casual viewer, I would be confused as heck by the structure of the show. First, it seems like The Corinthian is going to be the main antagonist, then the focus shifts to the Thewlis character, then a whole host of new characters are introduced with the Doll House arc. If this were a weekly TV show and you missed an episode or two, you'd be confused at heck. The main character isn't an active protagonist and is in the background much of the time, and he's not only unrelatable, he's actually kind of an asshole. I wonder if they made a mistake trying to adapt two trade paperbacks into a single series. I understand that it might have been difficult to stretch Preludes & Nocturnes into an entire season, and their aim was to adapt the series in its entirety, which would require being greenlit for more series than Netflix is willing to produce, but perhaps it would have been better to have been less faithful with the adaptation. I can't recall any successful Netflix shows where a story finishes halfway through the season and another storyline begins. I don't think the cliffhangers are strong enough, either. The entire reason people binge watch Netflix shows is because the cliffhangers leave them wanting to see the next episode. I don't get a strong urge to immediately watch the next episode. I did really like the way they adapted the Hob story. That may have been the highlight of the show so far. 

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On 8/21/2022 at 2:26 PM, ohtani's jacket said:

 I can't recall any successful Netflix shows where a story finishes halfway through the season and another storyline begins.

The Last Kingdom would base each season around two books.

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