THE LIVE-ACTION JOURNEY for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic spin-off Dead Boy Detectives – about two teenage boys who die, but whose ghosts hang around to solve mysteries – has been long.
Showrunner, executive producer and writer Steve Yockey had been a fan since the duo first appeared in 1991 and, as part of his overall deal with the studio, approached Warner Bros and DC to see if he could have the property. They said no. Then in 2019 The Sandman finally made it to the screen.
“Then the studio was more willing to let me give it a shot,” Yockey explains. The pilot was completed in October 2021, by which time the characters had appeared, played by different actors, in a Doom Patrol episode also written by Yockey. But his work on The Flight Attendant, world events and Hollywood strikes meant that production on Dead Boy Detectives only picked up again in late 2022, moving from original home Max to Netflix.
“It allowed us the freedom to be a little more integrated with , which was exciting,” says co-showrunner, EP and writer Beth Schwartz. “Just because we really do live now on the same Netflix-verse. But we didn’t really any of our stories. It was always the idea because our two main characters are running from Death. That’s basically the world that they live in. So it was always going to be in that
