Neil Gaiman Has Had Enough of The Sandman Being "Too Woke" Critique
The Sandman TV series has quite a number of controversial casting decisions.
Whether the controversy was caused solely by certain people's problems with the gender swap of certain characters, their skin color, or even homosexuality, or by fact that some of these casting decisions were just not very good for the roles, is hard to say.
Before the recently announced renewal of The Sandman for the second season there even were fears of cancelation, so clearly the series has its problems.
Neil Gaiman, however, is convinced of the former, and goes as far as to say that people who did not like the casting were not really fans of The Sandman to start with.
As he made clear in a recent interview, Gaiman believes that the live-action adaptation's most ferocious critics are just upset that the show was too "woke" for them:
"Oh, and occasionally, you get people shouting at us for having made up all of these gay characters who weren't in the comics, and then we'd go 'Have you read the comics?' And they'd go 'No.' And we'd go, 'They were gay in the comics.'"
As he elaborated:
"And they'd go 'You're just woke and nobody is going to watch your horrible show.' And then we went No. 1 in the world for four weeks. And they went 'It's all bots! We hate you. You're woke.'"
In particular, he defended casting of Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer instead of Tom Ellis, who played Lucifer in the namesake series on Fox/Netflix.
"Other grumpy people tended to be Tom Ellis fans, who were like, 'I love Tom Ellis! Lucifer is based on him, why didn't you cast him?' And honestly, he's not. He's a lovable rogue. He's a scab. He wouldn't work in Sandman because we have to get someone that makes people scared."
To an extent Gaiman is clearly right.
Yes, in the comics Lucifer in The Sandman and in his own series were the same person. The latter series started as The Sandman's spin-off. But the two TV series are not directly related, take place in effectively separate universes, and their portrayal of the Hell's boss is very different.
But whether if he's also right about Gwendoline Christie's character being able to make people scared, viewers can judge for themselves.
Recently The Sandman was renewed for Season 2; however, its released date seemingly won't be announced for a while.