David S. Goyer reiterates Sandman end was planned, though Neil Gaiman accusations made it "weird"

The creative team behind Netflix’s The Sandman continues to assert that they decided to end the series after two seasons long before accusations came out against co-creator Neil Gaiman. “But I’d be crazy to say it wasn’t weird,” co-creator David S. Goyer says in a new interview with Variety, acknowledging the coincidental timing. However, he maintains the same version of events as showrunner Allan Heinberg: There just weren’t enough stories about Dream (played in the adaptation by Tom Sturridge) to stretch out over more episodes.

Goyer explains that when discussing the show’s future with Heinberg and Netflix, “one of the concerns about some of the story arcs is that Dream isn’t in them very much. And so when we were discussing, everyone’s concern was like, are we really going to sort of deviate and do six episodes that Dream’s not in at all, except for the very end?” He says. “And the other thing was even though the original comic book run, I think, was 75 issues, we just ended up burning through story faster than we thought we would, because the individual issues, a lot of them, when they were first being published, are only 17 pages.”

The writer-producer continues, “So in many cases, the source material to make an episode was four or even sometimes five issues. So when we first went into it, we thought it would be possibly four 10-episode seasons. Now, the first season had 11, the second season is 12. When we talked through it, we felt, let’s make a slightly bigger Season 2 and take it through to the end. There’s always the possibility that we could do some of the other spinoff material, if you will. But it was just a question of, like, do we do it as three seasons? Do we do it as four? And again, we just decided, let’s just go for it and take it all the way through The Wake,” the final collection of Gaiman’s comics about Dream.

The Sandman will end with a bonus episode that qualifies as “spin-off material,” a standalone adventure about Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste). After that, the hourglass has run out on Sandman—as it has with Good Omens and Dead Boy Detectives, the other Gaiman adaptations that were airing when the sexual misconduct allegations against the author came to light. Goyer says that production on the second season was just weeks away from finishing when the accusations first came out, and Gaiman supposedly wasn’t as involved with the second season as he was with the first. “Obviously, it’s complicated. I have tremendous respect for women that come forward in those situations. It’s really concerning, but I know that Netflix, at the time, felt, ‘God, we spent two years making this thing. There’s all these actors and writers and directors involved that, if we didn’t air it, wouldn’t be fully compensated for it,'” he recalls. “And so we just decided, we’re going to let this work speak for itself. But I’d be crazy to say it wasn’t weird.”