The Sandman Story Changes

The showrunner of Netflix’s The Sandman tells EW that he’s wanted to adapt the legendary comic by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg ever since he first encountered it as a college student. After years of writing for TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy and The O.C. (where his real-life comic obsession fueled that of Adam Brody’s Seth Cohen), Heinberg finally got to make his dream come true. But he quickly encountered a problem.

“I’ve now been making TV and movies professionally for 24 years, so I reread the books specifically with an eye toward, ‘How am I gonna be able to do this?'” Heinberg tells EW. “Then I called [producer] David [S. Goyer] back and said, ‘I can’t do it. It’s impossible.’ In order to pull this off, so much of it would have to change in terms of how we approach the material.”