Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the previous entry, an interview with Teyonah Parris for Women's History Month.
When Netflix announced the “first trailer for Dead Boy Detectives to be released this week,” I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. The upcoming DC adaptation had gotten a teaser months and months ago. (Splitting hairs over the difference between a teaser and a trailer has proved to be a fool’s errand in recent years, but still…)
I’d like to say I was wrong. Not about the splitting hairs over teasers and trailers, that’s still dumb. (Though not as dumb as trailers for trailers; we can all agree that the death of that trend is right and just.) No, I was wrong about this week’s sneak peek being a run-of-the-mill second trailer, rehashing all of the same stuff just to add to the hype-train without any real substance. On the contrary, this new look at Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives is what dreams are made of. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, what Death is made of. And, more importantly, it highlights exactly why Dead Boy Detectives always needed to end up on Netflix rather than Max.
As far as their television adaptations are concerned, we met Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine in Doom Patrol Season 3 (portrayed then by Sebastian Croft and Ty Tennant). Eventually, Max decided they wanted to do a spinoff of the two, leaning into their popular comics history. The roles were recast due to the need of aging up the characters; the recasting brought in George Rexstrew as Payne, Jayden Revri as Rowland, and Kassius Nelson as Crystal Palace. However, when Doom Patrol met its fateful end, some fans assumed that Dead Boy Detectives would share its fate, ending up on the heap of other shows that (HBO) Max has scrapped.
As The Fates would have it, the series would end up at Netflix. Right where it belonged to begin with. You see, the Dead Boy Detectives don’t originate in the Doom Patrol comics (though they do cross over). The boys are introduced in The Sandman #25 during “Season of the Mists,” where their afterlife of evading Death (and hell) begins. But their small agency wouldn’t be introduced until three years later in the Vertigo crossover “The Children’s Crusade.”
If the series remained on Max, it’s likely that it would have played off of its connections to Doom Patrol. That would mean that Death would have probably remained either an unseen specter, chasing the boys throughout their misadventures, or a separate character altogether. She is, after all, the Sandman’s sister, and therefore likely solely tied to Netflix these days. However, landing on Netflix means that the series is free to intertwine the Dead Boy Detectives story with the series it was always meant to be connected to: The Sandman.
Fans of Neil Gaiman’s universe had been hoping and speculating for Sandman connectivity since Dead Boy Detectives was announced — a question that was ultimately answered by Gaiman last April — but this week’s trailer gives us the first tangible example of what that will mean for the series. Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s impeccable iteration of Death looms as the boys flee from their fate, even if we only see a quick glimpse of her in this trailer. And Death isn’t particularly used to not being able to capture her souls.
Now, technically, all of this could have happened regardless of which streaming platform the series ended up on — provided, of course, WBD’s licensing deal with Netflix didn’t forbid it — but history shows us that audiences prefer a level of continuity to where and how they’re watching their shows. Supergirl started out strong at CBS, but eventually resulted in diminishing returns. However, after crossing over with The Flash, CBS president Glenn Geller and team realized that the right home for the super-series was on their sister network The CW with the rest of the Arrowverse. (The Melissa Benoist-led series ranked as The CW’s most-watched telecast in its time slot in eight years in its premiere post-network shift.)
While Supergirl and The Flash couldn’t be more different in tone from The Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, they do help showcase some audience behavior that makes it all the more clear that Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine have ended up exactly where they needed to be.
This also serves as a huge boon to Netflix itself. With The Witcher on the decline (sorry, Liam, it’s not your fault) and Stranger Things and The Umbrella Academy both seeing their final seasons in the near future, the streamer is in desperate need of tentpole series. It’s seen some success with live-action adaptations of beloved anime and animated classics of late, but diversification is key to the long-term success of the platform, especially as fans grow more and more tired of the “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” method and the constant loss of shows before they’ve completed their stories.
By showing us Death in this new trailer, Netflix has opened up a whole world of possibilities for Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman alike. We don’t know when Season 2 of The Sandman will hit, but now we know we’ll be getting a taste of at least some of the goings-on on this side of the Dreaming before Morpheus and his siblings continue their stories. And with Dead Boy Detectives back in the universe it belongs in while still using Doom Patrol characters like Ruthie Connell’s Night Nurse, the possibilities are actually endless.
