17 Best TV Shows Like ‘The Sandman’ You Need to Watch
The Sandman is a British-American fantasy television series released in 2022 on Netflix, who also produced the adaptation. It is based on the graphic novel series of the same name by Neil Gaiman, published between 1989 and 1996 by DC Comics. A lot of amazing actors have joined the show and we’re absolutely sure that Netflix has another hit on its slate. Now, if you’ve loved The Sandman, you’re probably want to see something similar and that is why we have come up with a list of the 17 best TV shows like The Sandman you need to watch.
1. Good Omens
The angel Aziraphale and the demon Rampa, after 6,000 years of life on Earth, are not resigned to the imminent arrival of the Apocalypse. Best enemies in the world, they gang up on their higher authorities and try to influence the seemingly inevitable course of events by educating the Antichrist each in their own way. But if God has a plan, it is ineffable.
2. Carnival Row
Following a war lost by the Alliance to the Pact, many fairy beings had to flee their realms and emigrate to the human republic of Burgue. In this “Victorian” society, the Critchs (non-humans: fairies, pucks, kobolds, centaurs, werewolves, drow, etc.) are poorly accepted and accused of all evils.
An inspector, Philo, tries to elucidate a series of murders committed against fairy beings in the vicinity of the main street called “Carnival Row”, located in the area where many Critchs have settled. Philo’s life takes a new turn when he finds Vignette, a young and beautiful fairy, just landed in Burgue with whom he had created a strong bond when he was an Alliance soldier.
The city is also shaken by fights and intense political intrigues in the assembly, as in the street, which will not fail to upset the social balances in presence.
3. Shadow and Bone
The kingdom of Ravka has been cursed for millennia. Her fate now rests on the shoulders of an orphan. Alina has been recruited by the Army to accompany the Grisha, powerful magicians who fight against the evil fog that is tearing the land apart.
When her childhood friend comes close to death during a raid, Alina must face her fears and her destiny. The world of the Grisha is dangerous and the pitfalls are numerous. Who will Alina be able to trust, when the only person she could count on is no longer able to help her?
4. His Dark Materials
Raised in the austere and suffocating Jordan College in Oxford, Lyra Belacqua and her daemon (an expression of the human soul external to the body, which takes on an animal appearance), accidentally learn of the existence of the Dust.
This is a strange particle that the Magisterium (the armed wing of an all-powerful and radicalized Church) thinks to be the fruit of Original Sin. Scholars have indeed observed that this Dust is less attracted to the innocence of children than to the experience of adults.
Scientists, with the support of the Church, begin terrifying experiments on the Dust using children kidnapped all over England and sent to the frozen realms of the High North. Lyra is committed to the pursuit of these child kidnappers, who notably captured her best friend Roger.
5. The Witcher
In a world inhabited by humans, elves, dwarves, and other magical species, the balance is always unstable. The civilized races must in fact live with the monsters that threaten them and for this reason, mutant warriors have been created able to kill them: the Witchers.
Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, a mutant with special powers who kills monsters for money. Meanwhile, the land is in a state of chaos as the Nilfgaard empire tries to expand its territory. Among the refugees in this struggle is Cirilla, also called Ciri, the princess of Cintra, pursued by Nilfgaard. She and Geralt are meant for each other.
In his adventures, Geralt also meets Yennefer, a sorceress, and Jaskier, a bard.
6. Titans
Dick Grayson, Batman’s protege, has become an adult and has definitively emancipated himself from his mentor. He left Gotham City to work for the Detroit police. He then meets the young Rachel Roth, an empath, with powers that she can’t really master, who interests a strange sect. Helped by Starfire and Beast Boy, he will then form a group of superheroes to protect the young girl.
7. Doom Patrol
The Doom Patrol follows the unlikely heroes of the eponymous team, all of which have received their powers through tragic circumstances and are generally rejected by society. Most of the team members were treated by the Chief, a medic who gave them residence in his mansion to help protect them from the outside world.
Its name derives from a previous Doom Patrol team that was formed by the Chief. The first Doom Patrol members to be introduced to the series are Jane, the dominant personality of a traumatized woman with dissociative identity disorder; Rita Farr, who struggles to keep her body from turning into a jelly-like state; Larry Trainor, who has a negative energy entity living within him; and Cliff Steele, whose brain was placed in a robot body after a car accident.
Later, Victor Stone also joins the team, and he is a cybernetically enhanced superhero. In the first season, the Chief is captured by the malevolent Mr. Nobody, causing the Doom Patrol to go on a journey to rescue him. Along the way, they discover secrets about themselves and the Chief, from whom they eventually learn that he is responsible for the tragic events that gave them his powers.
In the second season, Dorothy Spinner, Chief’s daughter who possesses the ability to give life to her imaginary friends, joins the Doom Patrol. As members of the Patrol face their own personal dilemmas and wrestle with the truth about Chief, Dorothy inadvertently endangers the world when her powers threaten to unleash an ancient entity known as the Candlemaker.
8. Loki
The series focuses on the 2012 Loki, who is brought before the mysterious organization called the Temporal Variation Authority after stealing the Tesseract during the events of Avengers: Endgame (2019) and is given the choice to face the elimination of the reality for his recklessness or helping against a greater threat, for which Loki ends up traveling through time, altering human history by trying to fix the fractured timeline.
9. Dark
In 2019, police officer Ulrich Nielsen desperately searches for his missing 12-year-old son, Mikkel. Thirty-three years earlier, in 1986, it was his younger brother Mads who had disappeared in equally mysterious circumstances. In the town of Winden, four families, traumatized by this disappearance, try to solve the mysteries that surround the region.
Jonas Kahnwald is also marked by this affair, as well as by the suicide of his father. He tries to find out more. The investigations of the police and some residents bring to light a story that begins again every thirty-three years. Events taking place in 1953, 1986, and 2019 are closely linked. The research carried out to find the culprit of these disappearances will gradually reveal the secrets of the peaceful little town.
10. Stranger Things
The plot spans several months or even years, between 1983 and 1986. One evening in November 1983 in Hawkins, Indiana, twelve-year-old Will Byers suddenly disappears without leaving any traces except his bicycle. Several characters will then try to find him: his mother Joyce, his friends led by Mike Wheeler and guided by the mysterious Eleven, a young girl with psychic powers, as well as the police chief Jim Hopper.
At the same time, the city is the scene of supernatural phenomena linked to the Hawkins National Laboratory, managed by the United States Department of Energy (DoE) and indirectly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose experiments under the project MK-Ultra does not seem unrelated to Will’s disappearance.
11. Castle Rock
Strange stories have always played out in Castle Rock, Maine. Just think of the murderous dog Cujo, the escape from Shawshank prison or the missing boy’s body next to the train tracks. This time the story revolves around Henry Deaver, who disappeared as a boy for 11 days in the depths of winter in 1991 and suddenly reappeared in the middle of frozen Castle Lake, unharmed but with no memory of what happened to him.
Therefore, he cannot explain why his adoptive father, Pastor Deaver, was found by search forces with a broken back and died shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, Henry is a Texas criminal defense attorney who is lured back to his hometown from Shawshank Prison by a mysterious call for help. In the basement of the asylum, a nameless young man was found in a kind of bear cage inside a septic tank, who does not speak a word – except Henry’s name.
In Castle Rock, Henry meets his former neighbor Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey), his mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek), who now has Alzheimer’s disease, and her new partner Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn), who, as the former sheriff of the town, found and rescued Henry at the time. They all seem somehow involved in the mystery surrounding the mysterious prisoner, which some see as the devil.
12. Gotham
The series is a crime drama that examines the origin stories of future Gotham City Police Department (GCPD) commissioner James Gordon and the gallery of villains who will run amock in Gotham City. In the first season, Gordon and his partner Harvey Bullock have the task of solving the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, witnessed, among others, by the child-thief Selina “Cat” Kyle.
At the GCPD, Gordon is assisted by forensic scientist Edward Nygma, detectives Renee Montoya, Crispus Allen, and District Attorney Harvey Dent. Meanwhile, an underground war takes place between two crime families led by crime bosses Carmine Falcone and Fish Mooney. The gangster Oswald Cobblepot is forced into the middle. At the end of the season, Cobblepot kills Mooney and claims himself the “King of Gotham”.
In the second season, Theo Galavan comes to Gotham with his sister Tabitha, with the order by the Order of St. Dumas to kill Bruce. Gordon, Cobblepot, Selina, and the GCPD managed to save Bruce, however. Elsewhere in Arkham, experiments are being conducted at a facility called Indian Hill, run by Professor Hugo Strange, which turns inmates into monsters.
13. Watchmen
The series begins with a reminder of the Tulsa Massacre, when between May 31 and June 1, 1921, white rioters violently attacked the city’s black population. A child manages to escape in the middle of these riots. We find Tulsa, nowadays, in the uchronic world of Watchmen. Three years earlier, a group of white supremacists called “the 7th Cavalry”, claiming to be Rorschach’s successor, attacked all the city’s police officers and their families.
In order to protect their identity since this attack, poetically nicknamed “the White Night”, the state police officers are now authorized to mask themselves with a yellow bandana in order to maintain their anonymity. Deeply marked by this tragic night, Angela Abar, “Sister Night”, and the Tulsa police chief, Judd Crawford, decide to jointly investigate this small group and its followers.
It appears that Angela Abar is the granddaughter of Will Reeves, the child who had managed to escape during the Tulsa massacre, and who, an old man, is one of the central characters of the series.
14. Black Mirror
Each episode is independent, and the common thread of each is the advancement and progression of new technologies, the addiction to them, and their side effects. Different situations of the modern or future world are imagined and recreated in which a new technological invention or a paradoxical but realistic idea has somehow destabilized society and human feelings.
15. Samurai Jack
The series is about the samurai Jack, who is born a prince in feudal Japan. At just eight years old, Jack witnessed a giant, jet-black yōkai named Aku destroying and burning down the Imperial Palace and surrounding city. Ten years ago, Jack’s father accidentally summoned Aku. The Emperor was initially able to defeat Aku with the help of a holy katana, but Aku was freed again during a total eclipse of the sun. Jack’s father now tries to attack Aku again with his katana, but this time the yōkai manages to capture the emperor.
Jack is brought to safety and out of the country by his mother, who flees to Nepal and hides the sword in a Buddhist Shaolin monastery. Meanwhile, Jack travels the world and is taught different martial arts in different countries. After many years, when he is a young adult, Jack travels to his mother and has her hand him the holy sword.
It is then revealed that Ashi was born from the magic of Aku and is, therefore, his “daughter”. But she turns against Aku and Jack is finally able to destroy the yōkai. Ashi uses her powers to cast the same time spell that propelled Jack into the future. Both travel back to the 19th century, but Ashi pays a high price for it: Without Aku she would never have existed and so she dissolves into nothing before Jack’s eyes.
16. Arcane
The series takes place in the world of Runeterra, the fictional universe of Riot Games in which the games League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra and League of Legends: Wild Rift also take place. The plot takes place more precisely in Piltover and Zaun, two cities in conflict located in the same place – Piltover constituting the upper and rich part of the city; Zaun its unsanitary undergrounds, whose population suffers from poverty.
The storyline mainly follows Jinx and Vi, two sisters who had a difficult childhood in Zaun, but who, now adults, lead very different lives from each other, as well as Jayce and Viktor, two scientists who discovered and stabilized a molecule allowing great technological advances.
17. Supernatural
The plot goes back 22 years earlier, when one night, Mary Winchester is murdered and burned in her own home, causing her husband John Winchester to embark on an endless journey in search of answers. Twenty-two years after the incident, Sam Winchester lives with his girlfriend Jessica in Stanford, California, until one day, his older brother Dean Winchester, visits him and explains that his father is on a “hunting trip” and has been for days. nothing is known about him.