Watched the entire series. Extremely well done; they managed to capture the comics perfectly, with only a few minor exceptions. The actors were perfectly cast, too.*
The one flaw was Unity Kincaid’s timeline, which made no sense. How old was she, anyway? I can also see why they changed some elements, but the result was a logical mess. Still, the story was able to gloss over all that.
*With one exception. Jessemy was a raven and was identified as such. But they used a magpie for the part. 
Somewhere in her late 110s, I think (2022 - 1916 + her age in 1916) … but dream vortexes don’t necessarily age like normal people, and she was one, kind of.
Yeah, I didn’t get this. Did staying asleep slow her aging?
I don’t know that they explained it in detail but they mentioned that the sleeping sickness extended her life span.
A minor difference from the comics was that in the show Unity woke up to meet her great-granddaughter, but in the comics it was her granddaughter. That way they could maintain the timeline.
But the bigger problem was how did she remember the man? She would have been asleep during her child-bearing age and she was only awake a few months at most.
Maybe it could have happened in the Dreaming, but there are problems with that.
It was covered in the comic, but I can see why they changed that.
I took it to mean that she remembered only what she had dreamt. The real guy was raping an unconscious woman, so I don’t think her memories were based on what had happened in the waking world or anything about the actual guy.
What problem? It’s not like Dream was around to notice, and it’s made clear the Dreaming is vast, with lots of sub-reality pockets, where that kind of thing could be unobserved by other Dream entities.
It’s clear that a real-world baby can be conceived entirely in the Dreaming, like Lyta’s child. So it needn’t have had any real-world component. And I’m not sure rape is necessarily the best descriptor - Unity certainly sounded like she was seduced, not forced, when talking about the golden-eyed man.
The creative process as rape is pretty much the entire point of that story.
[Maybe even TV adaptations are suspect…]
I thought it was competent but uninspired. I felt like I might as well just go back and read the comic again. The episode didn’t add anything at all to the experience. Which is fine if you only watch TV and don’t read comics. But for me, I’m not looking for the identical experience but in a different medium. Give me something new to think about, something that adds to the story instead of just repeating it.
I don’t think there was a “real guy.” She was seduced in a dream by Desire, and that resulted in her getting pregnant in real life, much like Lyta did. The people in charge of her care assumed that there had been a rape, because how else could they explain it.
Ascenray, I have to admit that I have been experiencing the same concern. Best point of comparison I can think of would be the LotR films; they are reasonably faithful but not slavishly so, such that any JRRT diehard that has memorized all 3 books (ok all 6…) can still be surprised and enthralled by any changes or new wrinkles that PJ put in. Doing so I’d say actually allows the material to breathe in point of fact. A good example would be* Gandalf’s smoke sailing ship being blown through Bilbo’s smoke ring. [*Without going back and checking to see if that was a JRRT original-googling apparently indicates no, tho G. did blow his own ring thru Bilbo’s.]
But, while some details have been changed, elements added or removed or swapped, straightforward 100% identical quotings of dialogue straight from the original comics from panels if not pages on end has left this Sandman diehard feeling a bit offputted. ALL of the story ideas that Madoc came up with after he was given his Ironic Punishment were all from the original story. It just gives me a paint-by-numbers kind of feeling where the material is railroaded down an extremely narrow path-doing so simply doesn’t allow the material to have any life of its own, to someone who has read them all at least.
If PJ had done LotR straight and slavishly from the books I likely would have been bored right out of my skull.
I read them again recently and yes, they actually need a little tightening for adaptation. I’ve committed myself to skipping Tom Bombadil on my next re-read. I really do hate that section of the book. It’s the only section of LotR that I would have told Tolkien was a huge error. It’s so lame.
Ah! I was beginning to wonder whether anyone else felt this way.
Also I just realized the irony of describing an adaptation of this particular story as “uninspired.”
Not that it is strictly bad to adapt one’s work to a wider audience, or however one wants to rationalize it, but what I always feel is that the effort would have been better spent writing an original novel, or comic, or television show.
ETA I just remembered that Neverwhere was a tv show first, and then a novel, as well as a graphic novel, etc. But same thing; Gaiman has been consistently guilty of a lot of that over the years.
So in other words, If I read the comics they’ll ruin the TV show for me? No way I’m reading them now, then. I really like the show.
I’m not so sure that Sandman is “spoilable” in the sense that interest in the story isn’t based on a string of surprises or mystery box type secrets. And in general it draws from many extant sources. But, yeah, of just knowing what the stories are about and how they end will spoil it for you then don’t read the comics.
It’s definitely very close so far, so reading ahead is definitely going to be “seeing” future seasons in advance. I’d say avoid reading it if you want the show to be your main way of experiencing it. This was much more loyal than I expected and in some ways, it was actually kind of better than the books up to this point.
Watched that last night–Cats is animated, Calliope is live action. Loved the punchline of Cats, gave me an out loud guffaw.
There are points where adapting the story to the extended timeline (originally set in the 1980s) has felt a bit of a stretch, particularly with Unity and with Hob. But it’s not quite stretched to the point of breaking the suspension of disbelief.
Debatable. I mean, if Desire makes you want them, aren’t you having sex against your will?
What was the punchline? I must have looked away.