This New Neil Gaiman-Inspired Netflix Series Is ‘Hardy Boys on Acid’

Move over, Morpheus—the Dead Boy Detectives are coming to Netflix.

The Dead Boy Detectives began as a story in Season of Mists, volume 3 of Neil Gaiman’s classic graphic novel series The Sandman. In the original “Dead Boy Detectives” story, a boarding school student named Charles meets a ghost named Edwin before Charles himself is murdered. Together, the two boys evade Death and go off to have adventures in their own spin-off comics series.

Now, the Dead Boy Detectives are starring in their own Netflix series set in the Sandman universe. However, Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri) are carving out their own niche.

“Dead Boy Detectives is very separate from The Sandman,” says co-showrunner Beth Schwartz, who sat down with The Mary Sue to talk about the new series. “We live in the same universe, but the two shows are very different. We wrote it separately [from The Sandman], and when we felt like crossovers fit in naturally, that’s where we focused on integrating the two shows.”

In Dead Boy Detectives, Edwin and Charles run a detective agency that hunts down ghosts, witches, and other paranormal criminals that living detectives can’t handle. The two team up with a psychic with a mysterious past named Crystal (Kassius Nelson), who helps them interact with the living.

Schwartz says that although Neil Gaiman serves as an executive producer on the series, she and Steve Yockey, who developed it for television, were given creative freedom. Along with the various crimes the boys solve, the series will explore the characters’ backstories. “Mostly, we were able to open up our own world,” Schwartz says. “The tone [of the show] is sort of ‘Hardy Boys on acid,’ so we took that and really ran with it. We were inspired by the comic book, but we really let our [writers] room run free with these cases and crazy situations. But the heart of what the comic book is—the boys’ friendship—is what we hold true for the series.”

Although Dead Boy Detectives doesn’t have a release date yet, the series is slated to hit Netflix soon.

(featured image: Netflix)