The Sandman Review

The best hour is the twenty four hour diner, in which a man with a stolen amulet strips the inhibitions from a roomful of strangers and watches them destroy each other, and it works because it is contained, cruel and entirely about people. The other standout is a centuries spanning conversation between Dream and a man who refuses to die, meeting in the same tavern every hundred years, which is the purest expression of what the comic did well.

Visually it is superb, with a sand palette for the Dreaming and a genuinely frightening design for the Corinthian, and Boyd Holbrook, Gwendoline Christie, Mason Alexander Park and David Thewlis are all excellent. The problem is Morpheus himself. Tom Sturridge plays him as a monotone, motionless figure, which is defensible as a reading and deadening across ten hours, and the show's fidelity to the source means it moves at the pace of a graphic novel rather than a drama. Public allegations against its co creator overshadowed the second season and hastened its end.