Netflix Not Renewing Sandman Season 2 Because Fans Watched It Wrong?
Neil Gaiman says The Sandman Season 2 won't happen because the show was watched too slowly.
Fans have been clamoring for the word that Netflix would be working on The Sandman Season 2, but the only problem is that Neil Gaiman has told fans that the series was watched the wrong way, leaving the streaming platform to basically put a hold on moving forward with another season.
Apparently, based on the data gathered, Neil Gaiman claimed that fans watched the show far too slowly which messed up the viewership hours for Netflix. Normally, when a series is vastly popular, it is measured over a 28-day period, and during that period, numbers are counted in hours viewed by audiences. However, those numbers were negatively affected by people slowly spacing out The Sandman.
We don’t blame people for wanting to take things slow with The Sandman, as there were so many themes to be explored on an episode-by-episode basis. Also, for those who had not previously read the comics and dissected everything happening, we would imagine that people watching the show were sometimes confused and wanted to take a breather to discuss everything that they had just seen. There is nothing wrong with that, and we think it’s a much better compliment that people were taking their time with the series and wanting to understand all the amazing writing in the show.
Although this slow nature of people watching The Sandman may have been for the betterment of their understanding, it seemed to mess with the overall viewership of the show, meaning that it could be in trouble according to the initial viewership hour period that Netflix holds so dearly.
Take Stranger Things, for instance. The show catapulted into the #2 most viewed show in Netflix history based on that 28-day period, but that was because people were binge-watching the episodes so quickly in that period. According to the above tweet from Neil Gaiman, everyone took their time with The Sandman, so the number of people that watched the show might have been thrown off, or not counted within that 28-day period. Either way, the online community could go crazy for the series, resulting in Netflix bringing it back, which seems to be the case right now.
The Sandman did stay in the #1 spot for shows on Netflix for many weeks, and it has favorable ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. The series holds an 87% critic approval rating with an equally respectable 80% audience approval rating, so it’s not as if the numbers aren’t there to support another season happening on Netflix. The issue might be that people are tweeting at Neil Gaiman and asking him what the delay is when they should be doing so to Netflix.
If enough people beg for The Sandman to be brought back on Netflix, then the streaming platform may have to listen and fast-track another season. For now, nothing can be done on Gaiman’s side of things, other than to tell people that it’s their fault for taking their time by watching his show too slowly. We are not sure who is at fault here, but we would all certainly love to see more of Dream and his cohorts traversing the world with their Shakespearean way of speaking.
