[COLUMN] Dead Boy Detectives is a Frankensteined Sandman Tie-In |by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains extremely light spoilers for Netflix’s Dead Boys Detectives, discussing elements featured heavily in publicity material (and frontloaded in the show) that some viewers might like to experience unspoiled. But it’s mostly about brand synergy.

Dead Boy Detectives launched on Netflix this week. The series is, to put it frankly, a bit of a mess. It is also a peculiarity of the modern franchise age.

In a very literal sense, Dead Boy Detectives is a spin-off from The Sandman. The eponymous occult investigators were introduced in an article of The Sandman written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Matt Wagner. As is the way with popular comic book characters, Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland spun off into their own adventures. For example, they provided the spine of Gaiman’s Children’s Crusade, the first (and only) crossover of DC’s Vertigo line of comics aimed at older audiences.

In the decades since they first appeared, Edwin and Charles have even headlined their own self-titled miniseries and standalone graphic novels, under the pen of creators like Jill Thompson, Ed Brubaker, and Bill Willingham. Most recently, the characters starred in a limited series under the Sandman Presents banner overseen by Gaiman, written by Pornsak Pichetshote, and illustrated by Jeff Stokely. They are a niche property, but reasonably successful in the context of cult comic books.

Indeed, to those with no real knowledge of the show’s complicated development history, it makes sense to think of Dead Boy Detectives as a show spinning out from The Sandman. They are both Netflix shows based on Vertigo comics that are heavily associated with Neil Gaiman and which have a strong textual connection in the source material. Logically, it’s easy to imagine how the two shows would fit together. The comics provide a viable template for such an intersection.

Indeed, television is full of spin-offs that operate in the same way as the soft launch of Edwin and Charles in the pages of The Sandman. Characters introduced in one show become surprisingly popular and get their own spin-off. Fraiser spun out of Cheers. Mork and Mindy launched from Happy Days. The CSI franchises would introduce the casts of new shows as guest-stars on existing iterations. Sometimes it was organic, sometimes it was planned, but it was a reliable model.

Interestingly, though, Dead Boy Detectives did not begin as a Sandman spin-off. It was tied to a different comics adaptation. Edwin (Ty Tennant) and Charles (Sebastian Croft) appeared in the third season of HBO Max’s Doom Patrol. This makes sense, as Dead Boy Detectives and Doom Patrol exist in the same milieu, their defining and most popular comic book interpretations rooted in the Vertigo line overseen by legendary editor Karen Berger, a set of books that were hugely influential on an entire generation of fans.

HBO Max commissioned a pilot for a Dead Boys Detective show in September 2021. The show would be produced by Greg Berlanti, who had overseen the DC shows on the CW like Green Arrow and The Flash. It would be showrun by Steve Yockney, who had been responsible for The Flight Attendant. To put it simply, it seemed like the series would be developed in house by talent based at Warner Bros., using intellectual property owned by Warner Bros., for a streamer owned by Warner Bros.

Two months later, in November 2021, Warner Bros. had announced that it had recast the lead roles, with the role of Edwin recast as George Rexstrew and the role of Charles recast as Jayden Revri. The show’s pilot filmed in Vancouver in late 2021, with HBO giving a full-season order in April 2022. The production team returned to Vancouver to begin filming the rest of the season in November 2022, roughly a year after they had filmed the pilot.

The show was still in production when, in February 2023, it was announced that Dead Boy Detectives would be moving from Warner Bros. over to Netflix. The implication seemed to be that Dead Boy Detectives did not fit as part of the brand that James Gunn and Peter Safron were building for Warner Bros.’ new slate of DC content, which would launch with James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy (subsequently rebranded as Superman) in July 2025.

This move was not unsurprising. Netflix doesn’t have an in-house intellectual property farm like Disney has with Marvel or Warner Bros. has with DC, and so has bought most of its franchisable material from outside sources such as a lavish acquisition of Mark Millar’s Millarworld. Netflix tends to make deals with other studios for content, most notably a mutually-beneficial arrangement with Sony over the Spider-Man movies.

In particular, Netflix has been eager to pick up comic book material cast off by Warner Bros., often properties that originated at DC’s adult-skewing Vertigo line, and so exist at various degrees of separation from iconic characters like Batman and Superman. While Warners have produced shows like Swamp Thing and Watchmen, Netflix provided a home for adaptations that couldn’t gain traction at the studio, such as Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

This pipeline from Warner Bros. into Netflix demonstrates the thaw in the streaming wars. At the height of hostilities, companies like Warner Bros. were reluctant to license content to Netflix, treating it as equivalent to selling weapons to a competitor. However, since David Zaslav has taken over and prioritized easing cashflow, Warners have been increasingly willing to provide media to Netflix. A few months after Netflix took over Dead Boy Detectives, Warner Bros. opened negotiations to start selling older shows to the streamer. Now, Zoomers are discovering Sex and the City on Netflix.

The move from HBO Max to Netflix provided an opportunity for franchise synergy. Charles and Edwin had been introduced in the pages of The Sandman, and Netflix had recently invested in a very lavish adaptation of The Sandman. The company was eager to capitalize on this potential overlap. When production on that first season wrapped in April 2023, Neil Gaiman was asked in which continuity the show would exist. He answered, “Sandman Universe, I think it's safe to say now.”

While the show was filming when Netflix stepped in, the opportunity was too great to pass up. “Netflix encouraged us, even though we were already in production, to find some Easter eggs, some surprises, that because we’re on the same network we’re now allowed to include that we weren’t allowed to include before,” explained Yockney of the overlap between Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman. “I would obviously love to continue to cross-pollinate, where it makes sense, with Sandman.”

Yockney’s use of the word “surprises” is perhaps too generous. The show now features an appearance from Kirby Howell-Baptiste, reprising her role as Death of the Endless from The Sandman. This is not a spoiler. The character was prominently featured in early promotional material for the series and even appeared in the show’s first full trailer. Dead Boy Detectives frontloads Death’s cameo, making it the climax of the show’s opening sequence.

This material has obviously been very heavily reshot and retooled. Even positive reviews note that the introductory sequence might be the worst part of the series. At The Guardian, Joel Golby concedes, “The very first scene of Dead Boy Detectives is, well, bad.” This need and desire for corporate synergy, to line up intellectual property, taints Dead Boy Detectives from the opening scene. It’s more important for the show to be good than it is to be a Sandman spin-off.

The series suffers greatly from various clumsy efforts to retrofit Sandman continuity onto what was clearly an existing and independent show. The basic premise of Dead Boy Detectives finds Edwin and Charles solving mysteries in a Washington town, assembling a team of supporting characters like Jenny the Butcher (Briana Cuoco), occult dealer Tragic Mick (Michael Beach), the sinister Cat King (Lukas Gage), and evil witch Esther (Jenn Lyon). That is the show, as it stands in these eight episodes.

However, the first episode of Dead Boy Detectives effectively functions as two separate pilots. The first of which involves a host of hastily-reshot material that ties the show into the Sandman universe and has nothing to do with anything that follows. The second, which exists completely divorced from the first, launches the actual show. The result is incredibly disjointed. It seems like it might have been smarter to save the integration for a second season, where it could be baked in from the start.

The problem is compounded by the fact that neither Dead Boy Detectives nor Sandman are in the right place for this intersection at this moment. Edwin and Charles were introduced during the “Season of Mists” arc in Sandman, in which Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) abandons Hell. This allows various souls to escape captivity and make their way back to the living world. Edwin and Charles are two of those souls, abandoned in a creepy old boarding school.

Dead Boy Detectives seems to loosely maintain continuity with this concept. It is revealed that Edwin escaped hell in 1989, which lines up roughly with the launch of the Sandman comic in January 1989 the publication of Edwin’s debut appearance in April 1991. Flashbacks in the show tie neatly into the introduction of the characters in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Netflix’s press for Dead Boy Detectives frequently evokes “Season of Mists” by name, often in the opening words of the article.

However, as close as Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman come to lining up, it’s the differences that are most distracting. Edwin’s escape from Hell is dated to 1989, but the Netflix adaptation of The Sandman moves the events of the show forward by three decades to 2019. More than that, the show has yet to reach “Season of Mists.” The first season of The Sandman adapted eighteen issues of the comic, stopping just short of “Seasons of Mists”, which began with the twenty-first issue.

The first season ends with a tease setting up “Season of Mists.” Showrunner Allan Heinberg has acknowledged that “Season of Mists” will provide the basis for a significant portion of the second season. That season entered production in November 2023, but the amount of visual effects work that will likely be involved means that it probably won’t premiere until 2025. The result of all this is that Dead Boys Detectives feels like a spin-off from a story that has yet to be broadcast.

Of course, none of this is an actual continuity error. It’s very clear that Dead Boy Detectives was initially conceived in such a way as to allude to its origins as a spin-off from Sandman, but never directly acknowledge it. The show was never conceived as a direct spin-off from Netflix’s version of The Sandman, and so Edwin’s origin story was unlikely to neatly fit into Netflix’s telling of the tale. This is not a problem in itself. It’s the nature of production. Adaptation is change.

The problem lies in the decision to adopt that approach and then to push the show so firmly into the orbit of an incredibly faithful adaptation of The Sandman. Netflix’s Sandman is literally adapting the comic issue-by-issue, and so stitching Dead Boy Detectives into that template creates a dissonance. Netflix clearly wants the audience to think of Dead Boy Detectives as a spin-off from The Sandman, but the pieces don’t fit in the way they would if such a connection were organic.

Dead Boy Detectives illustrates the peculiarities of the modern age of interconnected franchise media and shared universes, where concepts that are very clearly wedded to one another can be torn apart by the realities of the larger industry and then clumsily stitched back together in pursuit of a shared universe after those connections have been torn out. The result is that, somewhat ironically, Dead Boy Detectives is haunted by The Sandman.