How Dead Boy Detectives Carved Out Its Own World in the Sandman Universe – IGN

Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. To read the last entry, check out It Is Impossible To Fight Through All of These Men, But Shōgun’s Mariko Managed It Anyway.

This column contains detailed spoilers of Dead Boy Detectives, a spinoff of The Sandman.

The Sandman casts a large shadow, which makes creating a spinoff in the same universe one heck of a tall order. Where the story of Morpheus and his Endless siblings is larger than life, many of the individual stories that take place in the graphic novels are more contained. Things like tone, aesthetic, character motivations, and more should all be their own thing.

If you’ve followed the Dead Boy Detectives saga, you know that the show was first meant to be over at (HBO) Max as a spinoff of Doom Patrol. However, after recasting the two leads and setting up a writing and production team, the series was eventually sold to Netflix. Now, if you follow my column regularly, you know that I believe that Dead Boy Detectives always needed to be at Netflix and connecting to The Sandman universe (as it does in the comics, though Doom Patrol crossovers have happened in previous runs). But, doing so meant that showrunners Steve Yockey and Beth Schwartz had some pretty Endless shoes to fill in the eyes of a lot of fans. So, how did they do it?

By not trying to fill those shoes at all.

While the crossover aspect is still apparent with Kirby Howell Baptiste’s Death in the pilot episode and her presence looming large over Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) throughout the season, and though Donna Preston’s Despair makes an appearance in hell, Schwartz and Yockey were free to play in their own sandbox and really make Dead Boy Detectives their own. And, If you’re wondering if they wanted to see the inclusion of more of The Endless, the answer is no!

“Death and Despair is who we asked for,” Yockey answers after I ask whether or not they had requested more characters and been declined. “It would be fun to drag all of those Sandman characters over, and certainly it would be noisy and get a lot of attention, but that really isn’t what Beth [Schwartz] and I are super interested in.”

Obviously, when the show was first created, Yockey and Schwartz didn’t know that they’d have access to these characters at all. Warner Bros. Discovery may have a hand in producing The Sandman, Doom Patrol, and Dead Boy Detectives, but what happens on Netflix and what happens on Max are completely different ball games.

“We designed the show so that it could exist within the Sandman universe without stepping on too many toes,” Yockey notes. “And then when we found out we were going to be on Netflix, we were like, ‘Oh.’ Then Netflix was like, ‘Hey, we love what you’re doing, but wouldn’t it be cool to have some crossovers in Easter eggs?’ And we were like, ‘What a great idea.’ And so we asked for those two characters for very specific reasons in the storytelling for our boys.”