Dead Boy Detectives

The mysteries are inventive, but it’s the characters and their relationships that keep the show addictive, especially when it comes to Edwin and Charles.

Entertaining, often quite weird, and strangely charming by turns, Dead Boy Detectives doesn’t quite reach the emotional and narrative heights of The Sandman. But it’s a good time in its own right, and its existence serves as an important reminder that there is (so much) more to this fictional world than Tom Sturridge’s Dream, and plenty of hidden corners worth exploring.

The series isn’t flawless, but it is ridiculous in the right way. And as with other Gaiman adaptations like Good Omens and Lucifer, genuine emotions lie under the veneer of eccentric, awkward comedy and situations.

The series might not inspire quite that level of devotion, at least in its solid-but-not-sensational first season. But it’s the sort of consistently likable amusement that in Charles’s 1980s heyday might have become long-running appointment viewing — and that we in the 2020s get to enjoy as a zippy, satisfying binge.

Something tells me most people who watch the show will agree we could have left the cringey exclamations of "brills!" out of the script. Despite this, and some characters who didn't pack as much of a punch as they could have, the series has heart and depth, and it's a convincing expansion of the Sandman universe, which is more than can be said for many recent spin-offs.

Despite its faults, "Dead Boy Detectives" seems dead set on providing passable, spectral entertainment even for those unfamiliar with the series (both of them) on which it's based. It's just a shame it doesn't feel like it has an identity of its own.

There’s stuff to like here: The White Lotus’s Lukas Gage is plenty of fun as one of the show’s more memorable villains, the Cat King, who seems to have burst straight out of a cursed production of the Andrew Lloyd Webber show, and Rexstrew and Revri are charming leads. But it’s not enough to make you want to stick with the convoluted, but somehow still predictable, plotting.

There’s so much that’s good about it. The writing, the actors, the directing, the cinematography. But most importantly the passion everyone who had a hand in making it has for the series. It’s truly a remarkable **** watch!

Serie carina, tra umorismo e avventura. **** simpatici e qualche soluzione un po' "meh". Tutto sommato piacevole, ma nulla di particolarmente avvincente.

I really like the premise, and I really want this to be better than what it is.I Like the four main cast members, and the plot is decent enough. The writing, however, is god awful. It’s embarrassingly predictable and obnoxious at times. The actors do their best, but if this show gets another season, they need to leave the current writers behind.

What could have been a decent spin-off from the Sandman universe ends up only keeping the worst parts. In typical Netflix fashion it's turned an interesting brand into a teenage coming of age-drama where everybody's gay for some reason. Every single main character is as physically attractive as they are vapid and utterly boring, and the only thing you need to compare to understand that Netflix has utterly violated yet another IP is to compare the cover art of the TV series to that of "The Children's Crusade". London is immediately replaced with the US for no reason other than pandering to an American audience, doom and gloom is replaced with a graphical profile reminiscent of "Stranger Things" since it's the only series Netflix has widely succeeded with, and somewhere along the way all creativity bleeds out, the idea dies and you spend a season watching a corpse of an idea -- or perhaps more accurately a ghost.

I started to watch the show, because of the good reviews. Someone even told me it was like "Umbrella Academy". Oh boy was that a dissapointment. The dialogues are just horrible, an eight year old could've written better. The characters are at the same time incredibly stereotypical and absolutely overboard. Then they sprinkled it with some also stereotypical gay cliches, anime-style-hard-to-grasp-overreactions and pseudo-dark stories ("dark" if you found the original witch Sabrina series dark). The whole thing feels extremely clunky, all in all I think the target audience is the general population described in the movie "Idiocracy".