SummaryGhosts and best friends Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) solve supernatural cases with the help of clairvoyant Crystal (Kassius Nelson) and her friend Niko (Yuyu Kitamura) in this series based on characters created for DC by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner.
SummaryGhosts and best friends Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) solve supernatural cases with the help of clairvoyant Crystal (Kassius Nelson) and her friend Niko (Yuyu Kitamura) in this series based on characters created for DC by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner.
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.
I really enjoyed this show. I know the original graphic novels were quite dark in tone, much like their Sandman origins. However, I appreciate the reverse Christopher Nolan the writers pulled by turning grimdark source material into unapologetic camp.
If you're expecting a 1:1 recreation of the graphic novels, you're going to have a bad time. If you're not used to more stylistic approaches to acting and dialog, and equate naturalistic acting with good acting, you're going to hate the performances. But if you meet the show where it's at, and stop worrying and learn to love the camp, it's a really fun ride.
The two leads are pitch perfect IMO. George Rexstrew as Edwin and Jayden Revri as Charles have an easy rapport with each other. I totally believe that they have been best mates for decades. Kassius Nelson as Crystal Palace starts as something of an audience surrogate, as we learn about the rules of the Dead Boys' world through her eyes. Although, she's definitely got her own stuff going on.
I personally liked Yuyu Kitamora as Niko... She kind of reminded me of early Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (mostly seasons 1 and 2) in a good way.
The Cat King and Esther chew the scenery like it's their favorite food (Esther is Madeline Kahn coded. If you know, you know), but they never got to the point where they started to grate on my nerves. Though your personal mileage may vary.
That said, there is an earnestness underneath the silliness that I think shines through. The protagonists make mistakes, and have to deal with the very real consequences of their actions, for better and for worse. At its heart, the show is about the growing pains of young adulthood, grappling with trauma, and the fumbling we all do in our late teens and early 20s to figure out who we really are. The way the show manages to depict very real traumas, ranging from minor to catastrophic, without losing the campy tone is laudable in my opinion.
Also, this show has "Our Flag Means Death" levels of LGBTQ representation, and I kind of love that for us!
Another paranormal show with WOKE themes running throughout. Good cinematography. Characters aren't too likeable. Themes aren't palatable. Fantasy isn't too believable. All in all: "skip this and watch the rabbits out in your back yard."
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.
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 **** 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 **** 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".