Neil Gaiman’s comic book series The Sandman alternates between focusing on Morpheus, the immortal Lord of Dreams, and on humans who encounter him or his immortal siblings. The first season of Netflix’s highly faithful adaptation kept that format — but The Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg found the structure didn’t resonate with TV viewers the way it did with comics readers.
“The audience wants a main character to invest in and root for and follow,” Heinberg told Polygon via Zoom. He says that whenever Dream (Tom Sturridge) or one of the enemies plotting against him was the subject of a scene, audience interest was high. “Anytime we switched to a different protagonist whose story is also related to Dream’s, like Rose Walker, the audience [asked] ‘Why am I following this person? Why aren’t I following Dream?’”
Season 1 of the show adapts the comic’s first two arcs, Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House; parts of a third book, Dream Country, were released as a surprise bonus episode. The season also sets the stage for the next two arcs. Season of Mists follows what happens when Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) seeks vengeance against Dream. But A Game of You barely involves Dream at all. Instead, it mostly focuses on Barbie, a minor character from season 1, and the fantastical world she visits in her sleep. Heinberg had already outlined a three-episode block for A Game of You, and wrote some scripts adapting the comics version of the story, where Barbie and her neighbors face a malevolent force that’s taken root in her dream realm. They’re helped by an ancient witch, Thessaly, who Dream later falls in love with. But Netflix executives told the writers they would have to shift the story’s focus to Dream to keep viewers from getting restless.
“We had a hard conversation, and they asked, ‘What would happen if we lost A Game of You altogether?” Heinberg said. “It actually works great, because A Game of You doesn’t actually affect Dream’s arc in any way.”
Rather than giving Dream a new relationship to replace his affair with Thessaly, Heinberg decided to spend more time focused on Queen Nada, the former lover Dream encounters in Hell in episode 4 of season 1. Cutting A Game of You also meant Heinberg could complete Netflix’s version of Sandman in two seasons, rather than three. Dream’s story will be wrapped up in 11 episodes, while the 12th will adapt Death: The High Cost of Living, Gaiman’s limited series following Dream’s elder sister, Death (Kirby).
“Neil had long wanted to do Death: The High Cost of Living as a movie, and developed it with Guillermo del Toro,” Heinberg said. “We thought, ‘Why not?’ Everybody adores Kirby, and we wanted to leave the season feeling loving and hopeful after being in such a dark place for so long.”
Season 2 of The Sandman feels more focused than season 1, both because it spends less time switching character perspectives, and because a single director, Jamie Childs, helmed every episode. Childs directed four episodes in season 1, and Heinberg decided he was the ideal person to work with on The Sandman after they shot their first episode together — the horrifyingly tense “24/7.”
“The voice of the show is very specific,” Heinberg said. “When [directors] come in and out of shows, oftentimes it can be a very lovely collaboration, but the tone can shift in ways that I think more episodic shows can sustain. Our show is sort of one long movie, and I think having that one point of view directorially really helps in terms of clarity of storytelling and tone.”
While directing an entire season involved an immense amount of work for Childs, that structure saved time and money, since Heinberg didn’t need to bring multiple collaborators up to speed on decisions made across the entire series. That proved helpful, since filming was interrupted by 2023’s Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes just two weeks after starting. The series was shot out of order to make the most of the cast and crew’s time at each location, requiring everyone to know the whole story so they could jump between moments in different episodes.
“My partner in this is my line producer, Samson Mücke, and he decided we were going to shoot all the hardest stuff first,” Heinberg said. “His feeling was, that’s how you build a team. We were on location outside for the first two weeks, and it was just massively physically difficult. Everything after that feels like a vacation. This show is absolutely impossible, but it’s all attributable to Samson and his scheduling and his budgeting. We couldn’t have done it without him.”
The first six episodes of The Sandman season 2 will be released on Netflix on July 3. The second half of the season will launch on July 24, followed by Death: The High Cost of Living on July 31.
