I think there are two factors that contribute to this:

Put me down for “Bernadette,” “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone.” Damn, those guys had a great run.

[Raises hand] I’m a big fantasy/SF fan, and I’ve loved many of Gaiman’s books and short stories. Comics, though, is just a medium I’ve never really managed to get into.

I disagree. You’re totally right that you can’t get everything right, little things that are unique to the comic medium, but it was absolutely in their ability to not make everything around Dream as dark and serious as he was. Cain and Abel are pretty on point in that regard actually, but even they just look so…

I’m genuinely surprised how anyone can say that this show nails the Sandman vibe. Don’t get me wrong I don’t hate it at all, and so far am quite content with the show. But it can’t be denied that it’s much more dark in style, much more noir. What I loved about the comics is how technicolour, wild and fantastical they…

“But I admit, I agree with that—the tone isn’t, for me, really quite captured and is a bit flat.”

American Gods.  Yeah.  That’s my worry with The Sandman.  I’ve watched maybe 6 so far and it’s great.  But I liked the first season of American Gods too and that got shitty real fast.  

Absolutely agree with the larger point about people not “getting” art as weak criticism, and with the idea that Barsanti’s day job as Newswire scold has damaged his reputation as a critic (weirdly, I don’t think that same stink has adhered to Hughes’ critical pieces).

I thought the “glossiness” of the adaptation was particularly noticeable in the third, Constantine-focused, episode. Britain as seen through John Constantine in that era was grungy, greasy, low-rent, working class. Mad Hettie fit right in.

I decided to soldier through and made it through the sixth episode and man am I glad I did. Because now I think this show is fantastic. Whatever pacing issues the first two episodes had are gone, IMO, and each of the last four episodes were really good. I don’t mind that the stories sometimes feel a bit disconnected -…

I found the first episode hard to get through. Watching at 1.25 speed has made the experience more enjoyable though.

In total fairness, being compared to the original source material is simply the risk you face when you engaging in the process of adaptation in the first place. And it’s a perfectly reasonable one; part of the point, after all, is to see what’s been kept, what’s being removed, and how effectively or closely the…

I mean, Sam Barsanti’s entire history of articles in AV Club is full of people calling out the fact that Barsanti never quite gets it--it being whatever the subject of the article is--so I guess Barsanti would know what it feels like.

Totally agree implying it is redundant and unnecessary since it doesn’t add anything beyond the comics is not the right way to judge it. Saying, “read the comics instead” is not really something many TV viewers are ever going to do.   There are comic readers and non-comic readers, and the first group is MUCH smaller…

I think the gist of the review is that it faithfully dramatizes the stuff that happens, but doesn’t really nail the vibe of the comics, which was what I was kinda worried about with the series, seeing some of the screenshots that were released. Still interested in watching it though.

While I respect this opinion, I think I disagree with the sentiment. The whole appeal of adaptations is that they’re trying to distill into another medium what made the source material so special, which is why it’s so frustrating when so many shows or movies turn adaptations into generic anystories.

If I’m reading a…

it seemed pretty easy to argue that Snyder didn’t really get it

Not just Unity, but Alex too. When the Sandman tells him he’s been imprisoned for a century, I was thinking WTH?

Starting off inspired by the more horror-based Swamp Thing was probably part of the reason for that.

One really weird part is that the story’s “present” is updated to 2021, and then seems to just hope we won’t notice that this would make Unity Kincaid around 120 years old.