Sandman On Screen

I agree with all of these reasons it'd be a devilishly hard television show to make.  But wouldn't it be a fascinating opportunity for HBO, Showtime or FX to really break out and do some astonishing long-form story-telling--in animation?  That's something that I think really is a frontier we've yet to reach, or even to approach, despite the phenomenal progress we've seen in television in the last decade.  We're living through what I thin is a real and important flourishing of animation as a medium of telling sophisticated and sometimes dark stories on film.  I defy anyone to say the first several minutes of Up weren't astonishing, and astonishing because of the depth and reality of human emotion they plumbed, including infertility and widowhood.  And Mirrormask and Coraline, both fairly dark works (though not as dark as many of the arcs in Sandman) by Neil Gaiman, have worked beautifully in animation or pastiches of live action and animation.  It'd be nigh-impossible to cast Sandman, so why not refuse to try? Capture the gorgeousness of the illustration, and make a brilliant cartoon serial for adults.