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Netflix's The Sandman was hoped to run for four seasons... but then they re-read the comic, and decided to end it at two
The Sandman comic is an ensemble story - but when Netflix decided to make the TV series all about Sandman, it suddenly became much shorter.
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The Sandman is part of the Endless, but his TV series is anything but - especially when its just about him. As we prepare for the final season of Netflix's live-action rendition of The Sandman comic, executive producer David Goyer is talking about the decision to end it after a seemingly brief two seasons - and says it wasn't due to viewership, budgets, or the specter of sexual assault allegations against co-creator Neil Gaiman - it's just that there wasn't as much Sandman stories in the Sandman comic as they originally thought.
"So in many cases, the source material to make an episode was four or even sometimes five issues So when we first went into it, we thought it would be possibly four 10-episode seasons, Goyer tells Variety's Jennifer Maas."Now, the first season had 11, the second season is 12. When we talked through it, we felt, let’s make a slightly bigger Season 2 and take it through to the end."
The main body of Sandman season 2 culminates with an adaptation of the final arc of the original The Sandman series 'The Wake.' While the Sandman comic ran for 75 issues, the Sandman TV series is doing all that in 23 episodes - and its mainly because the show's producers decided the series would focus on titular hero and not the overall ensemble cast, and as Goyer puts it above - there wasn't enough Sandman-centric stories in the Sandman comic as they thought, even though he had been attached to various incarnations of a live-action adaptation of this series since 2013.
"And obviously we love the books, but one of the concerns about some of the story arcs is that Dream isn’t in them very much,” Goyer says. “And so when we were discussing, everyone’s concern was like, are we really going to sort of deviate and do six episodes that Dream’s not in at all, except for the very end?"
"But it was just a question of, like, do we do it as three seasons? Do we do it as four?," says Goyer. "And again, we just decided, let’s just go for it and take it all the way through ‘The Wake.'”
Goyer says this decision came well before Neil Gaiman's sexual assault allegations came to light, but does make it clear in several instances that - at least from his perspective - Gaiman was less involved in the Sandman season 2 than the previous season.
Goyer says the door is open to do spinoff series so the Sandman (more directly than the short-lived and tenuous Dead BOy Detectives I presume), but even that is being folded into the Sandman's final season - as they're adapting the Death spinoff comic High Cost of Living as a surprise additional episode coda.
The Sandman season 2 hits Netflix on July 3.
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