Dead Boy Detectives: The Sandman Spinoff’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Is Out

Netflix’s new The Sandman spinoff, Dead Boy Detectives, was finally released on the streaming site today. The new series is based on the comics by writer Neil Gaiman and artists Matt Wagner and Malcolm Jones III. The series stars George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri as Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland, the titular detectives who solve supernatural cases while avoiding Death. The show’s first season is officially up on Rotten Tomatoes, and the reviews have been mostly positive. At the time of this writing, Dead Boy Detectives is up on the review site with an 89% critics score after 27 reviews. You can read some thoughts from the critics below:

“There’s a certain young adult demographic that’s going to eat this show up, but that shouldn’t deter any other viewer who loves a good comic book or ghost story,” Lauren Piester (The Wrap) wrote.

“A charmingly quirky mix of PI procedural and teen hangout, give or take some immortal monsters,” Alison Herman (Variety) shared.

“If there’s nothing groundbreaking here, it’s all uncommonly well done – cleverly written, smartly cast, sensitively played, marvelously realized,” Robert Lloyd (Los Angeles Times) observed. 

“Despite its gloomy-sounding premise, Dead Boy Detectives is the furthest thing from dour. Dark, sure; bittersweet, sometimes. But it’s never less than entertaining, thanks to an appealingly quirky lead cast and a cheeky sense of humor,” Angie Han (THR) wrote.

“Dead Boy Detectives takes the Sandman universe in a thrilling new YA-led direction that infuses old-school case-of-the-week storytelling with a modern spin that’s anything but ghastly,” David Opie (Empire) declared.

Do You Need To Watch The Sandman Before Dead Boy Detectives?

ComicBook.com recently attended a meet and greet with Dead Boy Detective showrunners, Steve Yockey and Beth Schwartz, and we asked if they recommend watching The Sandman or reading the Dead Boy Detectives comics before starting the spinoff series. 

“Well, I think that you don’t need to do any homework for the show, and I feel like it’s more fun,” Schwartz explained. “I don’t know, everyone’s different, but I think it’s more fun not to do anything before you see it. So you can be surprised and then you can go back and watch Sandman and read the comics after.” 

“And we are true to the boys’ origins and how they started the detective agency and Crystal’s backstory,” Yockey added. “But the rest of it is us kind of taking things from the comic books and sort of re-appropriating them, re-imagining them so that people who are familiar with the comic books will get to have those kind of like, ‘Oh, I recognize this, moment.’ … But regular people can just watch the show.”

Dead Boy Detectives is now streaming on Netflix.