Based on characters first introduced in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Dead Boy Detectives keeps the supernatural mystery-solving fun, while still embracing darker themes. Out on Netflix now.
The Dead Boy Detectives are a cult favorite that never quite found a cult. Introduced in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the undeniable strength of the premise — a ghost boy from the 1910s is best friends with a ghost boy from the 1990s; they solve ghost mysteries! — regularly lures in comics creators, but rarely for longer than a single story arc every five to 10 years.
But in Netflix’s new Dead Boy Detectives TV series, the strange world of Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland bursts with surrealist creativity, keeps itself squarely on the rails of the supernatural detective genre, and wraps the tension between those two poles around a chewy coming-of-age core.
Even this old-school DBD fan has to admit: Netflix’s version of the Dead Boy Detectives might be the best they’ve ever been.
Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives are the late Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri), who run a supernatural detective agency where they solve the mysteries of ghosts, demons, and everything else that goes bump in the night. The boys team up with the enigmatic and amnesiatic Crystal (Kassius Nelson) after exorcizing a demon from her, and, following the trail of a missing child, the trio finds themselves trapped in a small Pacific Northwest town brimming with supernatural conundrums. From there, they cross paths with a whole host of strange beings, including (but not limited to) a Cat King, an immortal witch, and a bored goth lady running a butcher shop. All the while, Edwin and Charles must evade the Night Nurse (Ruth Connell), the immortal being tasked with rounding up the lost souls of dead children and making sure they’re all in their designated afterlives.
Barring some tweaks to fit the show’s original pitch as a Doom Patrol spinoff, fans of the Dead Boy Detectives comics will happily observe that this is all very familiar (not that there’s exactly a surfeit of Dead Boy Detectives comic fans). But showrunners Steve Yockey (Supernatural, Doom Patrol) and Beth Schwartz (Legends of Tomorrow, Sweet Tooth) cannily insert two major changes to Charles and Edwin that make a world of difference in the show.
