New (second) trailer was released along with the date - 5 August
I’m cautiously optimistic…
First trailer:
It looks pretty good. I hope this can come close to the other recent Neil Gaiman adaptation, Good Omens.
I don’t usually complain about race in casting, but making Death (characterized, almost defined, as being a very, very pale Goth) black seems almost deliberately provocative. (I’m fine with any—even all—of the other Endless being POC, but Death needs to be bone white.) It reminds me of the first appearance of Deadpool, the Merc With A Mouth, where they remove his mouth.
…and if only you kept up the habit 
Did you miss the time Dream, also characterized as a “very, very pale Goth”( I mean, what combo of Peter Murphy, Robert Smith and Gaiman himself wouldn’t be Goth), was a Black man?
As a PoC sometime-Goth, I have no problem with this casting. I loved her in The Good Place and look forward to what she might do with the character.
To me, the defining feature of Gaiman’s Death is not her skin colour, but her warmth.
Hell, Dream was once a giant black car.
Yeah, it’s almost cultural appropriation (sub-cultural appropriation?) - the character was iconic and - at least in late-80s/early-90s Chicagoland - widely imitated. A generation of ankh-wearing goth girls are having their past wiped away. You could still cast the entire show by standing outside The Exit after midnight.
Re. MrDribble’s counter: yeah, it was established that the Endless look different to everyone based on cultural preferences and personal biases, and I’d be cool with them playing with that occasionally, but if we’re not doing it for Dream all the time, why Death?
In reality, it’s a marketing/messaging play. If you want a person of color in the Endless, Death is the most palatable after Dream himself. Desire (greedy), Despair (miserable), and Delirium (junkie or nutjob) have negative connotations; if one of them is black, the question becomes why that character? What’s the subtext? Whereas with did the only worry is the obvious Black Death puns.
You realize Gaiman himself is a producer here, right? The only appropriation that can happen is from him. And he’s cool with the casting. Chicago Hot Topic Babybats don’t get a say.
Although I must say, Chicago Goth girls must have been uber-comics fans to have adopted Death wholesale in the “late-80s” already, given she first appeared August of '89… 
I was unaware Gaiman was buying up every copy of the comics and burning them
Because Gaiman and the other producers want to.
Maybe they found an actor who could project Death’s actual defining characteristics, like warmth and humour?
I don’t know, maybe, just maybe: Your skin colour is irrelevant to your character.
What a terrible message to convey /s
I’m reminded how some readers’ minds were blown because they’d read all of American Gods and hadn’t realized Shadow was PoC until the TV show. Gaiman-related TV has been doing this since Neverwhere, up until Good Omens, I don’t see why this is surprising to anyone.
Death is Death. She’s a lively, vivacious, young girl who tries to make her “clients” accept what their fate is, without actually telling them their fate. How she presents herself, in whatever skin colour, is immaterial to her role in the grand scheme–that is, to comfort and escort clients to whatever comes next.
I hope that the movie will allude to the fact that Death is there for us twice, as Gaiman stated in the books–at our birth, and at our death. Her Ankh pendant represents our life, and her hand represents our death. No matter the Death character’s skin color, this is what matters in the story.
Cross-posting from the thread about “woke” movies (my bolding):
It’s a bit racist to suggest that black girls can’t be goths.
So it looks like you were asking for a warning and you got it.
Do not change user’s usernames to insult them. I can’t believe I even had to write that.
Neil Gaiman has been tweeting about this quite a bit. I’m not sure he is show-running it like he did with Good Omens, but he’s pretty involved.
Due to some licensing issues, I think, it should also be noted that modern-day Constantine is actually going to be Johanna Constantine in this show instead of the regular Constantine we know from Hellblazer. Jenna Coleman plays her and also plays the ancestor in the past.
He’s a producer, but not a show-runner. He’s said he’s more involved than with American Gods, but less than with Good Omens. He’s definitely been involved with casting.
I used “goth” as a shorthand for “very, very pale with black clothes and black hair”.
That’s not what goth means. That’s like using “punk” as shorthand for “guys with mohawks” or “preppies” as shorthand for “blonds in sweaters”.
Any pictures of Death online yet? I don’t see why being Black is a big deal.
Next year, Disney Plus has a Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief tv show coming out and Annabeth Chase, a blonde “California girl” in the book, will be Black in the new show. Her blonde hair is a prominent feature in the book(s), but it makes little difference to simply ignore it in the show.
It makes about zero difference.
Google Image Search is itself notoriously racist, so you’re hardly doing yourself any favours in citing it.
Or she can be Black with blonde hair. It happens.
Wow. This escalated.
First, that was a typo, not an insult. I went to use multi-quote and couldn’t find it, so had to type it manually when responding to two different posts. In context, I can’t see why that’s the conclusion you went for but this seems a touchier subject than I thought.
Second, my comment was tongue-in-cheek. I really couldn’t care less what race any of the characters are. I suspect Gaiman and I are of similar minds - the Endless are just representations of abstract concepts that transcend race. Nothing about Death is tied to race or gender, demonstrated in the books themselves by the Endless being seen as various races. Nor do I think there are scores of aging goth girls crying out for media representation.
And, for the record, I won’t be watching the show. I like a lot of things about Gaiman’s work, but I find his protagonists annoying. I quit reading Sandman, I gave up on American Gods, and I found even the trailers for that last show about the angel and demon too annoying for words.