Who is popular today?

The enduringly popular comic book series about gods and the afterlife gets the big-bucks, amazing-cast Netflix treatment. And it’s good. Very good, in factNothing lets me know I’m in for a week of tedious emails like being tasked to write about a big-budget fantasy series for this fun TV column. So it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I have watched The Sandman (available now on Netflix), the Netflix x Warner x DC crossover event of the summer. Do you feel it, sire? A disturbance in the email realm. It can’t be – no! Thousands of people who still have DVD collections are yelling at me in unison about lore!Anyway, you can stop telling me which subreddits I need to subscribe to, or what arcane maps I need to get out of the library, because I actually like this one. I have a potted history with fantasy television: we had a lot of it a couple of years ago, almost all of it bad, because they ignored the two primary rules for fantasy that I have made up and never actually bothered to tell anybody. Those rules are: good fantasy should ask the question “What if this thing happened? That’d be weird, wouldn’t it?” then set out some uneasy rules to govern that weirdness. That’s it. With that canvas stretched taut, you can tell intriguing human stories over the top of it. What if every man on Earth died in an event? What if a supernatural cabal actually ran the government but started getting nosebleeds and died? What if a book could predict the future? You can paint a vivid world that tells interesting stories from many angles, or you can have a character who is basically on a road trip looking for some golden trinket that magically solves everything, and stretch that story out for exactly as long as the studio is willing to fund it. The former is a lot rarer than the latter, sadly, and culturally we are poorer for it. Anyway, I’m not here to kick Westworld season 4 again. Continue reading...