The Sandman

Despite its credentials as “a comic strip for intellectuals” (as novelist Norman Mailer put it), the result is very middling, neither dream nor nightmare, just the vague reverie you have when you’re hungry and lunch is still an hour away.

It doesn’t help “The Sandman” for so many of its best ideas to feel like echoes of a story that’s already been told. And it doesn’t help that the show seems surprisingly afraid to get truly grisly. This should be a very adult show in terms of violent visions, but it seems toned down to appeal to a wider audience like so much product in the Content Era tends to be. So what does work about “The Sandman”? After some early season uncertainty, Sturridge settles into his role nicely.

The resulting series is visually striking but dramatically listless, made for those -- and maybe only those -- who already possess degrees in Sandman 101.

In many ways, the 10 episodes that are now streaming on Netflix represent the closest thing possible to bringing Gaiman’s earliest Sandman comics to life. And in others, it illustrates why it has taken so long, and why, sometimes, the great stories are not best served by remaining in the original forms.

It’s so focused on teasing this character or that realm that it forgets to craft a commanding through-line, fully abandons any discernible arc for its lead, and falls back on confounding dream logic to keep things moving forward. “The Sandman” isn’t an arduous watch, but absent a beating heart and a focused mind, it is easily forgotten.

The overall results are so shaggy and uneven, with characters and incidents from the comics that add little to the story on screen, that the reasons to adapt “The Sandman” never exceed the reasons not to have done so. ... The rocky performances and wavering accents among the secondary cast members parallel the disappointingly unimaginative (and not particularly lavish) special effects.

The portrait The Sandman provides feels as paint-by-numbers as any other generated by the Netflix algorithm. The series rushes so quickly toward a kinder, cuddlier version of its titular character that his transformation first feels curiously weightless, and finally emotionally hollow — an ephemera evaporating in the daylight, or perhaps yet another example of beloved IP getting lost in the queue.