Mon - Fri 8:00 - 6:30

Because everything we do in life affects our health and legacy.

Entertainment

Why 'The Sandman' Is Only Getting 2 Seasons: Showrunner Reveals the Real Reason

Why 'The Sandman' Is Only Getting 2 Seasons: Showrunner Reveals the Real Reason

The Sandman is coming to an end after just two seasons.

Showrunner Allan Heinberg spoke to THR about the early conclusion of the Netflix TV series.

In the show, after years of imprisonment, Morpheus — the King of Dreams — embarks on a journey across worlds to find what was stolen from him and restore his power.

During the conversation, the showrunner revealed the real reason behind the series only going two seasons deep before its conclusion.

Keep reading to find out more…

“We learned making season one that we were only going to focus on the stories where Dream was the protagonist. In the comic book, it has more of an anthology structure. There are long story arcs where he may appear in one or two scenes, but there are other people’s stories. We realized that the audience, for a serialized drama, needs a character that they can follow and root for throughout the entire run of the show,” he explained.

“Anthologies are very difficult to pull off [because] every time you introduce a new cast of characters, you have to earn the audience’s trust, love and rooting interest. And with this show, we watched the audience reaction to the first episode and then the second episode, and their interest was always held when Dream was either onscreen or the subject of the scene. But anytime we drifted into other people’s storylines, they got confused and lost interest because it’s called The Sandman and they thought the show was about the Sandman, which we all understand.”

“So, by the end of season one, we started looking at the stories that were going to be part of a proposed second season. The biggest question mark was around a graphic novel called A Game of You, where Dream has two or three appearances, but it’s not his story. It’s Barbie’s story, who we introduced in season one. So there was some debate about how we would do it. The writers and I actually spent two months, because it was a three-episode arc, building a story for Dream to be part of A Game of You that was not in the comics. In order to tell that story, it would have to become a Dream story, and we labored a long time over it,” the showrunner went on.

“In the end, Netflix came to us and said, ‘What if we skipped it storywise? Since we are focusing on Dream, what if we went straight from the end of Season of Mists into Brief Lives [for volume one]?’ It was a proposal. They asked me, ‘How do you think you would do that?’ And because Dream isn’t in A Game of You, it was fairly easy [to adapt]. So, from the comics, we substituted his affair with the witch Thessaly, and we concentrated on Nada — Season of Mists is all about Nada [the Queen of the First People who Dream condemned to hell for 10,000 years after she rejected his proposal to be with him]. So him proposing to Nada again and Nada rejecting him took the place of Thessaly’s rejection, and it was a very seamless way of transitioning into Brief Lives,” Allan said.

He went on to say, “I had always thought of The Sandman as a three-season show with 11 episodes in each season, and initially I had crafted season two to end with Orpheus’ death and Dream’s response to it. And then the third season was going to be The Kindly Ones [the ninth and penultimate installment of the original Sandman comics], and everything that comes after. And when we took A Game of You out of the mix, it created all the space we needed for The Kindly Ones and everything that came after. So it was a very organic process of looking at the comics and saying, ‘If we’re just telling Dream’s story, what are those elements, and can we do it in the 11 episodes that we had? And then [we’ll have] the additional Death episode at the end.’”

He also teased how the show comes to an end. Warning: spoilers ahead!

“That final episode is a very interesting episode for us. It’s freestanding. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the 11 episodes prior to it, but it’s a continuation of all the themes that we’ve been exploring the entire time. It’s especially topical now — I mean, I guess it’s always going to be topical — because the world is a very dark place at the moment, and we are all trying to figure out how to live in it with love and with hope. That’s what Dream is trying to do the entire time in the body of the season, and that’s what Death is trying to convey to Colin Morgan’s character, Sexton. So that’s our goodnight kiss to the audience, and our thank you to the audience for staying with us through these two seasons,” he said.

Find out which Netflix shows have been renewed and cancelled in 2025.


Credit Goes To: Source

9 hours ago
By Halo

Opinion and Comments