Sandman TV series: Neil Gaiman says all scripts are written, waiting on Coronavirus lockdown to lift

“Mr Sandman, bring me a dream! Make it the greatest show that I’ve ever seen!”. That paraphrasing little ditty is something that fans of Neil Gaiman’s masterful Sandman graphic novels have been singing for years now as various entities attempted to adapt the sprawling tale of mythology and fantasy to the screen. After years of a misguided feature film adaptation being stuck in development hell, things were finally looking up when Netflix snatched up the rights to instead do a much more fitting big-budget TV series adaptation with Warner Bros Television.

With acclaimed TV, comics and film veteran Allan Heinberg set as showrunner and Gaiman himself co-writing and executive producing with David S. Goyer, everything looked like it was finally happening. And then the Coronavirus happened. That’s as Gaiman revealed in a Tumblr post last week (I’m guessing it took this long to hit the news cycle, because Tumblr?), in which he updated on the state of the show, saying that the production has actually quite a bit of progress with the entirety of the first season already written.

It’s going really well, except it’s kind of hibernating right now until people start making TV again. The scripts for the first season are written, casting had started, directors hired, sets were being built. Everything was ready to go into production, and then we moved into a pause. As soon as the world is ready to make TV drama, ‘Sandman’ will move smoothly back into being made. In the meantime, we are taking the opportunity to get the scripts as good as we can.

Bringing The Sandman to the screen has been such a long and – up until now – fruitless journey, that to hear of this level of production completion, as relatively minor as it is, has me hyped again. Casting is going to be key on this, as the role of Morpheus AKA Dream of the Endless is such an enigmatic one. Also, while Gaiman has previously revealed that the first season of the show will just be adapting Preludes and Nocturnes, the first eight-issue volume of the series, boiling down this epic, sprawling, genre-hopping tale to just a handful of episodes is a Herculean task that I just can’t wrap my head around. The fact that they already have and can now just fine-tune their approach is highly intriguing.

That approach may still not be correct but Gaiman himself seems very happy thus far. And at least it’s no longer a dumb single Hollywood movie. This is reportedly the most expensive TV series that Warner Bros has ever done, and I can’t wait to see how all that money was spent.

Last Updated: April 21, 2020