For those eagerly anticipating the second season of Netflix's stellar adaption of Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels, Dead Boy Detectives—the streaming plaform's new supernatural horror detective series—is a welcome return to that weird magical world. Co-showrunner Steve Yockey (Supernatural), who created the series, aptly describes it as "the Hardy Boys on acid." You've got vengeful witches, demons, psychic mediums, cursed masks, foul-mouthed parasitic sprites, talking cats—and, of course, the titular ghostly detectives, intent on spending their afterlife cracking all manner of mysterious paranormal cases.
(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)
Sandman fans first encountered the Dead Boys in the "Seasons of Mist" storyline, in which the ghost Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland meet for the first time in 1990. Edwin had been murdered at his boarding school in 1916 and spent decades in Hell. When Lucifer abandoned his domain, Hell was emptied, and Edwin was among the souls who returned to that boarding school. Charles was a living student whom Edwin tried to protect. Charles ultimately died and chose to join Edwin in his afterlife adventures. The characters reappeared in the Children's Crusade crossover series, in which they decided to become detectives.
"As far as I was concerned, this was obviously the ultimate, the finest, most commercial idea I had ever had: two dead boys and a detective agency, you're there," said Gaiman during a virtual media event. "Nobody else saw it. It was just this mad conviction that sooner or later, there would be somebody out there in the world who would pick up one of these comics, read it, and see the same thing. Little did I know that baby Steve Yockey was out there waiting to be infected."
Yockey championed the project from the start. "I fell in love with the comic when I was very young and I was going through a personal loss, and I found it weirdly comforting in a psychedelic way," he said. It's thanks to Yockey that the Dead Boys popped up in a S3 episode of Doom Patrol when he was a writer on that series. The characters proved so popular that HBO Max ordered a pilot for a Dead Boy Detectives series in 2021. The project subsequently moved to Netflix. Per the official premise:
AdvertisementMeet Edwin Paine (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), "the brains" and "the brawn" behind the Dead Boy Detectives agency. Teenagers born decades apart who find each other only in death, Edwin and Charles are best friends, ghosts… who solve mysteries. They will do anything to stick together—including escaping evil witches, Hell and Death herself. With the help of a clairvoyant named Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson) and her friend Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), they are able to crack some of the mortal realm’s most mystifying paranormal cases.
"I knew the things I wanted to hang onto in the adaptation were the relationship between the boys and Death, because that drives our action, and also this sense of, don't wait until you're looking death in the face to start living," said Yockey. For his co-showrunner, Beth Schwartz, it was the close friendship between Edwin and Charles, forged out of their painful pasts, that cemented her love for the series. "It's this horrible tragedy when you really think about it," she said. "It's these two boys who didn't get to live past their teenage years. But because of that tragedy they created this amazing friendship."
The Dead Boys came out of the Sandman canon, but that series was at Netflix, while Yockey was initially developing Dead Boy Detectives for HBO Max, So Gaiman and Yockey essentially "filed off the Sandman serial numbers" for their early scripts, per Gaiman. When the series moved to Netflix, the streaming platform's only request was to set the story back in the Sandman universe. Charles and Edwin are evading Death to solve mysteries in their afterlife, so naturally, Kirby Howell-Baptiste makes a cameo in a pilot scene penned by Gaiman, reprising her role as Death. One other Endless makes an appearance late in the season, and eagle-eyed fans might spot nods to the original Sandman artwork in the set design.
- Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) are the Dead Boy Detectives, ghosts who solve paranormal mysteries.Netflix
- Edwin and Charles must keep evading Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste).Netflix
- The boys are aided by a psychic medium named Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson).Netflix
- Crystal is being stalked by her ex, David the Demon (David Iacono).Netflix
- On the case.Netflix
- Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon) is an evil witch out for revenge against the Dead Boys.Netflix
- The Cat King (Lukas Gage) has amorous designs on Edwin.Netflix
- Ruth Connell plays Night Nurse, part of Death's bureaucracy.Netflix
- Tragic Mick (Michael Beach) runs a magic shop but longs to be a mighty walrus again.Netflix
- Jenny Green (Briana Cuoco) runs the Tongue & Tail butcher shop.Netflix
- Niko (Yuyu Kitamura) loves manga and, well, love.Netflix
- The Dead Boy Detectives agency, at your service.Netflix
Ruth Connell plays Night Nurse, reprising her role from the Doom Patrol episode. She's basically a bureaucrat charged with finding lost children's souls and making sure they end up in their designated afterlives. She's rigid, perpetually overworked, and seems positively allergic to paperwork. ("There's so much of it," said Connell of her role. "It has been millennia, you don't understand.") Niko is an entirely new character created for the Netflix series. Kitamura described her as "the love cheerleader of the group. She wants the best for her friends, and she is so obsessed with making sure that they are their truest self."
Briana Cuoco plays Jenny Green, Crystal and Niko's landlord, who runs the Tongue & Tail butcher shop and fiercely protects her privacy. The cast also includes Lukas Gage as the slyly seductive Cat King, protector of cats (who can talk in the Sandman universe); Michael Beach as Tragic Mick, who runs the local magic shop but longs to be turned back into the mighty walrus he once was; and David Iacono as David the Demon, Crystal's ex-boyfriend who possessed her and then stole some of her memories when the Dead Boys cast him out.
The Dead Boys face several adversaries, but among the most formidable is Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon), a witch whom Lilith granted eternal life—but not eternal youth. So Esther preys on girls to avoid aging. The Dead Boys rescue one of her victims in the pilot, and Esther spends much of the first season seeking revenge. When Yockey sent out the casting call, he described the character as a "burnt-out Stevie Nicks with '80s vibes," and Lyon captures that perfectly. "She's the asshole I've always wanted to be, and this gives me the chance to do that," said Lyon. Joshua Colley plays Monty, Esther's crow familiar, whom she turns into an astrology-loving handsome boy, the better to spy on the Dead Boys by striking up a friendship with Edwin.
AdvertisementThis is an unapologetically queer show, per Yockey. Aging Charles and Edwin up into their teen years inevitably brings up sex and sexual identity, and Edwin, in particular, struggles with his complicated feelings for Charles and budding attraction to Monty while fending off the amorous advances of the Cat King. "There was something inherently interesting to me about having a boy who died in the early 1900s discover over the course of a season that his identity was even a possibility," said Yockey.
That said, "It wasn't just, this character is gay and therefore their storyline is being gay," he added. "That's not interesting to anybody. We tried to find lots of different ways to explore sex and sexual identity." For instance, Crystal and Charles form a connection, but is a relationship even possible between a ghost and a living woman (even one who once dated a demon)? Or a crow-turned-human and ghostly detective? There are plenty of potential entanglements—so much so that the showrunners joke that they ditched the classic love triangle for a "love rhombus."
The queer aspect is very much in keeping with Gaiman's long history of including such characters in his work. "I was putting lots of queer characters in and trans characters in because my friends were queer and trans, and they weren't in comics, so I was going to put them in," said Gaiman. "At the time, it was just all one with this strange thing that we were doing that was completely out of step culturally with whatever else was happening in 1989. And it's wonderful to see that it's become part of the cultural conversation. I love that we can do a show that is queer, but it's for everybody.
"You make stuff up and sometimes the stuff you make up goes off and walks in the real world," Gaiman concluded. "Sometimes it walks in a shambling limp, and you think, oh well, that one didn't really work. And sometimes you get something like Dead Boy Detectives and it flies. This, for me, is the most perfect incarnation of the Dead Boys. It's funny, it's silly, it's terrifying, it's brilliantly plotted, it's gloriously acted, and you never know what's coming next. What more could anybody want?"
Dead Boy Detectives is now streaming on Netflix.
