A Horny Cat King Helps Bring ‘Dead Boy Detective’ to Life
Depending on your personal interpretation, you may subscribe to the notion of ghosts as unquiet spirits, haunting the realm of the living until some injustice they suffered in life or at the moment of their death is corrected, amended, forgiven. Ghosts, then, are the perfect clients for a certain type of private investigator motivated to simply provide closure to lost souls. It’s a heady intellectual conceit, and it’s also the hook that provides the backbone to Dead Boy Detectives, Netflix’s mystery series based on Neil Gaiman’s comic-book characters. And make no mistake: While there’s plenty of talk about life, death, and the afterlife, the show is light on its feet, a teen adventure series whose unquiet spirits are nothing compared to the trials of growing up—even if you’re already dead.
Prim and proper former English schoolboy Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and erstwhile streetwise punk Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri) are ghosts who have chosen to remain in the world of the living, solving ghost mysteries in order to send other spirits in need to whatever afterlife awaits them. The eight episodes of the first season take a throwback case-of-the-week approach, subtly building a season-long arc while its main characters are busy finding out how and why people died, whether that means breaking a curse, revealing some hidden treachery, or fighting a giant ectoplasmic toadstool. They’re joined in their quest by Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson), a medium with a literally demonic ex-boyfriend, and Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), Crystal’s doe-eyed best friend with a sizable collection of anime boy posters on her walls.
Being a Greg Berlanti production, it’s good, but you have to be on its wavelength. It’s a Sandman spinoff, but there’s less of The Sandman’s ethereal musings on the nature of life and death and dreams, and more of a teen-adventure-drama vibe, like a slightly more eldritch Scooby-Doo. It’s good in the way that Riverdale (another Berlanti production) was “good”: It’s absurd, it’s melodramatic, and everyone’s delivering their parcel of gobbledygook lines in extra-heightened cadences. It also looks a lot like those shows, especially Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, another Netflix comic adaptation with a similar dimly-lit, misty atmosphere that immediately advertises the presence of witches and spells and the undead. (It also means you won’t be able to see this one in the daytime, either.)