The long-running comic book series about gods and the afterlife gets the big-budget, all-star Netflix treatment. And it’s excellent. In fact, it’s quite good.
Nothing informs me. I’m in for a week of tedious emails, such as being assigned to write about a big-budget fantasy series for this entertaining TV column. So it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I have finished watching The Sandman (available now on Netflix), the summer’s Netflix x Warner x DC crossover event. Do you have a sense of it, sire? A commotion in the email realm. It can’t be, no way! Thousands of people with DVD collections are all yelling at me about lore!
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Anyway, you can stop telling me which subreddits I should follow or which arcane maps I should borrow from the library because I actually like this one. I have a smattering of experience with fantasy television: we had a lot of it a couple of years ago, almost all of it bad, because they ignored the two primary rules for fantasy that I invented and never bothered to tell anyone. These are the rules: good fantasy should ask, “What if this thing happened?” That’d be strange, wouldn’t it?” He then established some uneasy rules to govern that strangeness.
That’s all. You can tell intriguing human stories over the top of that stretched canvas. What if an event killed every man on the planet? What if a supernatural cabal actually ran the government before succumbing to nosebleeds and dying? What if a book had the ability to predict the future? You can paint a vivid world that tells interesting stories from a variety of perspectives, or you can have a character who is basically on a road trip in search of some golden trinket that magically solves everything, and stretch that story out for exactly as long as the studio is willing to fund it. Unfortunately, the former is far more common than the latter, and our culture suffers as a result. Anyway, I’m not here to get rid of Westworld Season 4 again.
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