The first thing to say is that overall, it looks amazing, and it feels exactly like slipping into the comic, the way revisiting any well-loved story should. For me, having read the comics (admittedly about 20 years ago), it's immediately obvious who's who, what they're doing and why. I had some misgivings about Tom Sturridge's voice, but he looks the part, especially when they do that cool effect of putting his face in shadow and making his eyes glow.
The rest of the cast looks great, as do the settings, and they manage to convey the feelings of horror, hope and awe from the comic, at least most of the time. Particular standouts are "The Sound of Her Wings" and "Calliope", the latter a particularly faithful and effective adaptation.
I thought Gwendoline Christie was an inspired choice for Lucifer, not because I thought the part desperately needed to be played by a woman, but because she was made androgynous enough that you could believe she'd once been an archangel. I sort of missed the effect from the comic where Lucifer's appearance changed from page to page, but this was very well done.
I also loved Boyd Holbrook as the Corinthian, because he looked great in the role, but he was let down by being in too much of the show. As I recall, the Corinthian doesn't appear until the second story arc, The Doll's House, and his crazy teeth-eyes don't show up until late in that storyline. Here he's kind of... around all the time. He shows up at Roderick Burgess's house as soon as Morpheus breaks free, but we don't know what he does there, because the Burgess crew doesn't appear again in the show. More frustratingly, he spends the second episode chatting with John Dee's mom, and just when he's about to kill her, he gets disintegrated by her amulet of protection. It undercuts a lot of the menace of the character.
My other big complaint with the show was the timeline. The comic starts in 1916, the same as the show, and like the show has Dream escaping his prison in the present day. The problem is that the two respective present days are 1988 and 2022. They try to address it in a couple of points, like having Unity Kincaid be Rose Walker's great-grandmother, but it just doesn't hold up if you think about it. For one thing, asleep for a century or not, Unity is way too spry for being about 110.
The same has to be said about John Dee: if you do the math, he's about 100 when he retrieves his ruby and tortures that diner. His mother's age is explained by her having that amulet of protection, especially because she immediately grows to her proper age when she gives it to him, but it just doesn't work that he's a slightly dotty middle-aged man stumbling around, when you realize that he's over a century old. They could have probably moved Dream's capture forward to World War II instead of the Great War, and then the timing would have worked better.
The show also suffers a bit from having to be separated from the DC Universe, though I think I understand why it had to be (they probably couldn't link it to the Justice League or Wesley Dodds or John Constantine because of the fact that it was on Netflix). But those links are one of the things that made the comic work: you learn that John Dee's ruby wasn't just some MacGuffin that tormented the Justice League, but the Sandman's focus of his power, which changes the import of the stories that featured it before then.
Perhaps my biggest frustration in this regard was casting Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine. I'm not a Doctor Who fan, so I don't really know her body of work, but she gives it a good go (and it was fun to see Rick the Vic!). However, she's too clean and stylish to really be convincing as JC, at least not the way Matt Ryan was in his own show and in the ArrowVerse. Kristen Ritter's performance as Jessica Jones is closer to the character, but Jenna Coleman just didn't sell the role for me.
So what were the standout moments for me? The Sound of Her Wings was so well-done, at least in parts, that I almost teared up watching Death come for the elderly violinist, as an example. And the sequence of Dream's meetings with Hob Gadlen over the centuries was just about perfect. I've already raved about Lucifer, but the sequence where Dream and Lucifer vie against one another was also well-done.
The scenes at the collectors' convention were also great, especially when we started to see the Corinthian being creepy. And while I hadn't been expecting it in full, I liked seeing the nod to the 1970s Jack Kirby Sandman, in the shape of Jed's dreams (I can't imagine anyone cares about the TV rights to that...).
The other standouts were "The Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope", which adapted the stories from the comics pretty much perfectly. I liked how Calliope, the episode, didn't show Richard Madoc raping the Muse like the comic did, but how it indicates exactly what's happened, including by highlighting to us the scratch on his cheek, which she probably gave him fighting back. It would have been horrible to show the actual assault (to say nothing of triggering, especially for those who've actually suffered rape or other assaults), so I thought it was handled well.
Of course, part of what made those two stories work so well is that Dream appears only briefly in both, which is what made the overall series work.
Overall, it's a really satisfying adaptation. The themes are still as resonant now as when Neil Gaiman wrote the comics back in the 80s and 90s, and the changes to the casting are mostly unobtrusive (the actors who play Death and Rose Walker are particularly great). It mostly captures that low-key horror from the books, acknowledging that the worst horrors are the ones committed by the humans, not the supernatural beings.
In fact, I'd say the mark of the show's success is that the day after I finished it, I stopped by my local bookstore for something else, and saw the entire set of collected editions on sale. Reader, I bought them all.
Now, I just can't wait to see how they tackle my favorite storyline, A Season of Mists.
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