Neil Gaiman ponders how long ‘The Sandman’ could run on Netflix

While a season 2 isn’t a given at this point, the out-of-the-gate popularity of Netflix’s dark fantasy series The Sandman almost guarantees that the streaming giant will return to the prodigious well of source material provided by showrunner Neil Gaiman’s original comic books for another season, at least. And Gaiman makes no bones about his work’s ability to support several seasons beyond that.

Well, we’re told the first 400 pages of a 3,000-page arc in the first 10 episodes, so there’s a kind of a “you do the math” on that. Gaiman told Variety, when asked how long the series might continue, “the other answer is, how long is a piece of string? What we know that we would like to do, in a perfect world, as long as the audience is there and people come out for it and people want it, is we want to tell the whole story of Sandman that went through to ‘The Wake,’” he said, referring to the final volume and epilogue to the original comic series, which ran for 1989 to 1996.

Even beyond the original source material are the many prologue and epilogue series that have continued to be released over the years, as well as a variety of spinoff material. Gaiman acknowledged that those stories could just as easily be used in seasons of the new series. “We want to tell ‘Sandman: Overture,’ and somewhere in there, possibly, even as a special or whatever, we’d love to do things like ‘The Dream Hunters,’” The American Gods author stated. “We quite probably weave the stories that are in ‘Sandman: Endless Nights’ into the body of the whole. What is nice is we have the entirety of Sandman to draw on.”

Gaiman also noted that the source material provides more than a few opportunities for spin-off series, and admitted that a Johanna Constantine series would be near and dear to his heart:

“We also have the ‘Death’ books. It might be great to go off and do one of those as a sideline, in addition to which, anybody who has seen Sandman Episode 3 has sidled over to us at some point or other in the last six months and said, ‘Do you think there’s any possibility that we could do a Johanna Constantine show with Jenna Coleman?’ And, oh my God, she’s a star and you just want to see her going through battling demons and destroying other people’s lives. So that’s in there, too. We can keep going on this for a long time to come.”

— Neil Gaiman

Gaiman refused to commit to any hard number when it came to how many seasons the show may continue if allowed, only that he would continue to tell the story as long as he could and was necessary. “This isn’t us going, it’s eight seasons exactly and then out — or five seasons and out. We want to tell the story.” 

The Sandman is currently available to stream on Netflix.