1. Paper Girls Season 1 - (8 episodes) amazonprime
(created by Stephany Folsom)
2. The Sandman Season 1 - (11 episodes) Netflix
(developed by Neil Gaiman, David S. GOyer, and Allan Heinberg)
I was downright shocked when I saw the first Paper Girls trailer. I was a fan of the comic (and both its creators, Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang), but had no idea that it was being adapted into a streaming series. Not only that, but the trailer implied some level of fealty to the outright bizarreness of the comic, which takes some pretty interesting tangents over its run.
For me, the make-or-break of the series was going to be casting. The cast calls for a quartet of 13-ish-year-old girls to be in the lead, and the personalities that Vaughan and Chiang had crafted for them were so specific and distinct. Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) is the shy, overprotected new girl to her paper route, unaware of the post-Halloween dangers she faces. Tiff (Camryn Jones) is a very intelligent tech geek who has rigid discipline and big aspirations. KJ is the rich kid with "sporty" sensibilities (carrying her lacrosse stick with her everywhere as both security blanket and protection), which is obviously code for being gay, which in 1985 is not something 13-year-olds were encouraged to be honest about. And Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) is the one who has a disillusionment beyond her years, growing up poor and abused by her father and abandoned by her brother. These roles are, most surprisingly, perfectly cast. In each case it's like they've lept to life direct off the page, and there's no sense of stilted child-actor jitters, they're all legitimately very good-to-great performers.
They collide in the Detroit suburbs on the morning of November 1, 1988, as the nefarious dregs of youth are out causing mayhem, and targeting anyone vulnerable. In teaming up for protection, they're together when they have an encounter a strange duo who barely speak English, wearing strange clothes, and sporting some bizarre technology. Shit hits the fan and the paper girls are on the run before being transported in time, to the future of 2020. In their confusion they wind up at Erin's parent's home, now inhabited by adult Erin, who is living a pretty sad life. Future Erin provides them a space to sleep, but little comfort (particularly for young Erin who is not impressed with herself) nor safety, as a sort of time police enforcer is on their trail, ready to eliminate them for their transgressions in time.
Over 8 episodes the series bandies the girls around time in the Detroit area, uncovering the future war that is taking place across history, and learning at least one side of the story, while prejudging the other. Wormholes, giant mech suits, disintegration rays, and iPods are all in play and more, which creates a very rich timescape to explore, but what makes the show stand out most is the ephasis it puts on how the characters relate to facing their future selves. It's one thing having to manage your past, but it's a whole other thing knowing your future, and for some it comes as a relief, but for others it's too much for their young brains to accept.
Ali Wong plays future Erin and I loved the interplay between her and Riley Lai Nelet. The same can be said for Tiff as Camryn Jones encounters her future self in Sekai Abenì. These past and future selves truly felt like the same person, but with the years between them. There's a definite familiarity they have with one another, like family, only with the head trip of knowing they are one and the same (but the additional head trip of learning their future self is just a possible version thereof). The show handles these encounters beautifully and brilliantly, highlighting the strangeness of it while also showing the connection and discomfort.
On a sci-fi level, I like how the show (as with the comic) deals with time travel, in that there are no paradoxes to speak of. That the paper girls can time travel, and their future selves have no recollection of it, is just sort of taken in stride. There's reasoning out of it all, but the story never feels like it needs the reasoning specifically, it's just a wholly different take on time travel in the modern age.
Over 8 episodes there's not a lot of downtime or treading water, it's an incredibly propulsive story. Everything seems to always be moving forward and change is a constant, just like the comics. I was never not delighted, and for a sort of light sci-fi adventure, it packs some really deep emotional sequences, and is a show that slow burns what building friendships looks like.
I genuinely loved Paper Girls. And then Jason Mantzoukas showed up and my head exploded with joy.
While Paper Girls is maybe the most recent comic to receive and adaptation, The Sandman has been living in a sort of development hell pretty much since its inception. Writer Neil Gaiman created (and adapted) the concept of the King of Dreams for his comic book series, bringing his love of mythology, religion and lore into the DC superhero universe (and ultimately evolving beyond it, incepting the Vertigo imprint as a result). Within the first two years of publishing, Gaiman said recently in an interview on WTF with Marc Maron, he was approached to have the series adapted for screen, but he turned down the offer. He wanted to work on the series unfettered until it reached its completion as he almost always had in mind.
After issue 75 concluded the comic book series in 1996 (and a gaggle of spinoffs were born, one of which Lucifer, was already very loosely adapted for TV) the rumours of a Sandman movie spread regularly with all manner of directors and stars attached (sometimes with Gaiman on board, often without). There was a real Bullwinkle-esque "This time for sure" vibe to every single one of these offings, but (mercifully, I always thought) they never came to be. There was no real way to ever contain nor distill The Sandman into a single film, nor series of films, without really neutering what it was.
So this proposed Netflix series, long-gestating, seemed like myth to me even as it moved through production. I always thought, at some point, the rug would get pulled out, that even if it were complete Netflix would see the futility in trying to adapt the series to a moving picture medium. Yet, here it is.
I've watched it all.
And having watched it all, I still can't believe it exists.
If not for the fact that The Sandman is one of the all-time bestselling comic books series internationally for the past 30+ years, I would question how this series could ever exist in this form. It's truly like nothing else on TV. It's very much the comic come to life, with some modifications.
There was much noise to be made when casting was announced, including a few familiar names, but a lot more deeper cuts, and a few unknowns. But the big pre-announced cast was like a dozen or so names. Each episode, following the comics almost exactly, is its own little movie, playing in different genres, with its own little world and cast, which puts the cast list at a length that would make Game of Thrones blush (only difference is most are not ongoing characters).
Since it follows the comics so closely, it's Gaiman's storytelling style to a T. A series of standalone stories that thread and connect to eachother in sometimes small and other times large ways, all part of painting a very grand tapestry. Just like in the comics these initial stories are individually very compelling, but from the onset it makes it hard to really get a sense of what, exactly, The Sandman as a series is about. But that tapestry is really about exploring humanity in all its complex forms, being driven by ego, or fear, experiencing loss or transition, facing up to one's failures of the past and learning how to do better in the future. It's in this reality of near gods and human monsters that we see ourselves reflected to extremes for most entertaining and insightful parables. It's not preachy or clobbering, quite the opposite. It's stimulating and somewhat unassuming.
In Sandman lore, the Dream King is Morpheus, and he is one in the family of The Endless. The others include Death, Despair, Desire who we meet in the show (the others, Destiny, Destruction and Delirium we've yet to encounter) and any other adaptation would quickly introduce these as their main circle and play off the family dynamics over a season, but not here. Death gets a spotlight episode (played beautifully, and so kindly, by The Good Place's Kirby Howell-Baptiste) while Desire gets some glorious cameos (with some absolutely necessary vamping from Mason Alexander Park). Knowing how the comics build up over its storytelling life, that there are seeds already planted in this current run, and how it evolves into less one-story-at-a-time and into much grander arcs with occasional stand-alone tales, I'm very hopeful that the series gets to explore the full comics run, and we get to meet the rest of the family.
Visually, the show is an oddity. It's not quite cinematic, but it's also not quite televisual. It's definitely grand in scope and scale, and doesn't shy away from heavy effects (but is very shrewd in when and where it uses them without seeming cheap about it). The sfx aren't necessarily top shelf, but they're not bargain basement either. At times the effects are almost impossibly perfect (Matthew the Raven seems very much like a real raven quite often) while others (like the presentation of the Dreaming, Morpheus' land, or the big scenic views of Hell) can look a little like video game cut scenes. Acceptable enough for suspension of disbelief, but not quite real enough to avoid the uncanny valley. The way the show is presented is in an old-school widescreen (with black bars on top and bottom of the screen) yet it still feels pinched somehow, elongating the figures slightly on screen (many a 70's film had this feeling, I'm sure there's a term for it...anamorphic maybe?). It's definitely an aesthetic choice, one that I like because it gives the show a very ethereal look even in the more commonplace settings.
The first ten episodes, as noted, are part of a whole but each presents their own satisfying story in and of itself, and yet the whole is quite satisfying as well, giving the sense of growth of Morpheus as a character, showing that he too is capable of finding change within himself, and having increasing empathy for others.
A few weeks after the shows debut, a surprise 11th episode dropped, within which contained two stories, the first a fully animated and starring cats (with barely a cameo from Dream) in a near-rotoscoped CGI style. It's presence tells us that Sandman won't always be beholden to a specific style or structure. The second story could have been a full episode on its own, and establishes that, on top of being the Dream King, Morpheus has had a storied past, with traumas that likely account for much of his hardening over time, traumas that he's only now coming to terms with and starting to move past.
My worry for the series, especially in the wake of the big Netflix losses in recent moths, is that the show is either deemed too expensive and not renewed, or worse, it's budget is slashed and it becomes unbearably and noticeably cheap. But, even if the show doesn't persist, it's true enough to the comics that the story can always be completed that way.
No comments:
Post a Comment