 |
| Just let this one slip through your fingers, Kripke. |
So. Eric Kripke, creator of Supernatural, is apparently in talks to write-produce a television series based on Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels. (I'm going to go ahead and assume that if you're reading this, you've read the Sandman series. If you haven't... go do that. Now.)
Since I love Sandman and I love Supernatural, you'd think I'd be giddy over this. And yet... not so much. I'd love to see Morpheus and the rest of the Endless interpreted for television – provided of course that the show was picked up by an HBO or Showtime where 2/3 of the content wouldn't have to be cut to appease the FCC – but I don't feel like Kripke is the man for the job. They're just two different animals. And sure, maybe Kripke has a range for which I'm not giving him credit, but since the Winchester saga is his greatest credit to date it's sort of all we have as a gauge. And I just don't think it's a good fit.
Sandman is a complex epic dealing with gods and myths from several pantheons and a lot of sensitive subject matter – everything from drug use to rape to religion to insanity to infanticide and everything in between. You could argue that Supernatural deals with a lot of these same issues, but that's exactly where my problem lies, because Supernatural deals with its issues in much less mature ways. There's a well-known trope among fans about what happens to female characters on the show (the short version is they don't last long), things that start as serious moral issues (like killing a possessed human to kill the demon lurking inside) are later ignored for expedience, and let's just say Sam's whole demon blood addiction storyline wasn't exactly After-School Special material. There's a pretty big rift between the way these two universes handle the source material – both approaches work in their own environment, but they really shouldn't mix. I mean... can you honestly picture a version of Sandman where the female characters are reduced to mother figures or sexual conquests and the male lead cracks wise all the time? I love Dean Winchester like woah, but... no.
Kripke has referenced a lot of Gaiman's work in Supernatural. He's obviously a fan. But being a fan isn't all one needs to make a faithful representation. Just look at season 5's "Hammer of the Gods," which seemed influenced by Gaiman's novel American Gods. I say "seemed" because in Kripke's version Baldur was British, Ganesh was black, Kali was a helpless damsel in distress who needed rescuing by humans, and Odin was just a grumpy old man with two eyes. They used some of the most well-known gods out there and they still got it wrong. So what is a Kripke representation of Bast going to look like?
Seriously. Watch that episode and tell me if this is the guy you want handling a multi-arc story weaving together mythologies from all over the world and incorporating fictional anthropomorphic versions of abstract ideas. The depth just isn't there. You'd wind up with something like this tragic movie script in which the Corinthian steals Morpheus' ruby to bend the world to the whim or serial killers or something and Morpheus and Rose Walker make out to save the world. No really.
Maybe the biggest red flag for me is that Gaiman isn't on board with this potential TV adaptation. That leaves the door open for tomfoolery like that movie script, or like Kripke giving all the Endless daddy issues, or like Death wielding a shotgun and driving a 70s muscle car. My faith in a decent Sandman TV series hangs on the approval of the story's creator and someone at the helm who I feel is up to handling the themes and subject matter with the grace and maturity of the graphic novels. And to me, Kripke just isn't that guy.
But I still love Dean Winchester.
No comments:
Post a Comment