Some thoughts on The Sandman (It's good!)

I really liked the show, but have not read the comics.

First, I really thought the actor for Morpheus pulled off the otherworldly, uncanny, often cold, with bursts of strong emotions thing really well. Especially in how his emotional reality. His physical presence is excellently weird and ethereal. One thing I think that might have led to different interpretations for us is that I only saw him cry when Jessamy dies. They actually did a visual effect on his eyes in certain scenes that look like distant reflected starlight, but could be mistaken for crying.

I personally have very little capacity for long, drawn out television. I really enjoyed the way they compressed it into something watchable. The specific way they did this was in my opinion brilliant. It's actually the first thing I've ever watched where "it was all a dream" feels like a something other than a cop out. The "waking world" in the series still feels like it has collided with the dreaming. Things that Morpheus is involved in end up having a "dream logic" quality to them, even if set in the "waking world."

I think this is why it has a "Doctor Who" feel, but that's more because the "multiverse movie problem," as the writers of Everything Everywhere All At Once put it, also applies to time travel. Those concepts tend to move stories into the dreaming inherently.

Finally, conservatism: humans are so short lived that they tend to be bad at situating themselves in history. The small scale conservatism we see in the spirit of the times, seeks to preserve some dream of how society should be. A lot of the race swapping makes it more clear that to these beings, the time when everyone was Black is subjectively quite recent. Their conservatism is more like "there is nothing new under the sun," or "it has always been this way."