Netflix’s The Sandman Is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes

Nettlix’s The Sandman is Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, having achieved an 89% Tomatometer score, with forty-five reviews having been submitted. Sandman is the long-awaited adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s famous comic series, which as been lingering in development limbo for decades. Now That Sandman is here, there’s certainly a lot riding on it – both in terms of providing a show that hardcore fans of The Sandman comic will appreciate, and attracting a mainstream viewer audience. And Netflix’s version of Sandman has to do it all without the benefit of those DC Universe connections. 

So… what are critics saying about Netflix’s Sandman? 

“The first season of Netflix’s The Sandman wrangles what many consider the most offbeat and unwieldy Sandman stories into a neat package, losing some of the weirdness at the fringes in favor of a more streamlined whole,” ComicBook.com’s Jamie Lovett writes in his four-star review. “Once past those shaky first steps, the adaptation does justice to the source material series, serving as a 21st-century update to the long-revered epic that will appeal to longtime fans as a new way to engage with it while also bringing that story to an entirely new audience. 

While purists may bemoan some of the changes, they ultimately make for a more cohesive viewing experience that still allows the individual short stories within the grander saga the room needed for viewers to fully appreciate them. The Sandman team has taken Dream’s comics and crafted a worthy adaptation of a story that is, after all, about how we take the stuff of dreams and apply it to our lives, our art, and our relationships. And after seeing that tease at the end of Season 1, viewers will almost certainly be dreaming of what comes next.”

On the other side of the review spectrum, NY Magazine Vulture critic Roxana Hadadi feels like Sandman ever establishes its titular figure well enough to have the show feel like it has purpose: 

Neither sweet dream nor horrifying nightmare, Netflix’s The Sandman, the long-gestating adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s legendary DC Comics series, is more of an afternoon nap, the kind that unintentionally whiles away an afternoon: initially pleasant, but then it just … keeps going. After the season’s visually ambitious and ominously tense first half, the pacing slows and the narrative flow stagnates until you feel like you just woke up on the couch with bleary eyes, a fuzzy mouth, and the rest of The Sandman already half-forgotten. 

Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge) may offer “freedom and adventure” to his mortal visitors, but The Sandman doesn’t entirely hold up its end of the bargain. That reneged promise is tied primarily to the series’ treatment of Dream, who goes by many names over these ten episodes – Morpheus, the Oneiromancer, and of course, the titular Sandman – but never seems fully fleshed out. And without a strong sense of Dream and his motivations, all the stories and characters revolving around him suffer, too.

Netflix’s The Sandman is now streaming.