First: Sit down. Next: According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is once again being considered for television adaptation, this time by Warner Bros. TV.
The show’s development into a TV series is still in its “early stages”; the biggest impediment right now is that Warner is still “in the midst of acquiring television rights” for the show from DC Entertainment — a process which may be made easier considering that DC Entertainment is a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Entertainment — and Warner is “in talks with several writer-producers about adapting the 1990s comic.”
Their current top pick to direct TV Sandman, supposedly? Supernatural creator Eric Kripke. Topless Robot’s Rob Bricken is excited by the prospect of this:
[F]rom everything I’ve heard about the show, Kripke sounds like the perfect choice to make a Sandman series. He knows how to make weird material exciting and watchable to modern audiences, without dumbing down the material, and can handle both serialized storylines and overarching plots with panache. If he’s any kind of a nerd — and I’m guessing he is — I imagine he’d treat the source material with the respect it deserves, too.
A word of caution: This follows several unsuccessful attempts to adapt Sandman, first as a film through the ’90s, then as an HBO series. One key question here is which network this would be for: A Sandman adaptation on, say, a broadcast network like The CW would presumably have to be toned down a lot more than Sandman for a cable network. A watered-down TV Sandman would be more of a heartbreaker than more than no show at all, but it’s still exciting that this is a live possibility once more.
(Heat Vision via Topless Robot)
