As far as Neil Gaiman adaptations go, “The Sandman” sits squarely in the middle. The strengths of its source material buoy it through some of its weaknesses, but it has a fair number of those weaknesses — most of which rear their ugly head early on in the first season’s 10-episode run. The main weakness being: Dream himself, Tom Sturridge.

Sturridge is wildly miscast as the King of Dreams, coming off less as primordial awe-inspiring entity, and more as a mopey emo boy with a bad haircut. Dream is a tricky role for anyone to play — it’s less about the acting ability than it is about the aura one gives off: intimidating, inhuman, cosmic, and maybe even a little cruel. The star of “The Sandman” was always going to be a sticking point — the only actor who could feasibly play Dream might have been ’70s David Bowie. As it is, though, Sturridge does his best growly voice to try to imitate the haunting way that Dream speaks (in the comics, his word bubbles were black and whispery compared to everyone else’s standard white) and is suitably pale and gaunt-looking, but his performance mostly gives “Edward’s constipated face in ‘Twilight’” energy.

To go into whether the changes that the Netflix series made — moving the timeline to modern-day versus its original late ’80s setting, changing the genders and races of several characters — work or not would veer too deeply into spoiler territory, and honestly, be a little too pedantic. But for the most part the changes do work, though some of the less-successful changes do feel like a symptom of what I like to call “the Netflix effect.” A few elements are a little too clean, too shiny, too softened to make the same visceral impact that the a few brush strokes on a comic book panel could make. To put it plainly, there are images from the “Sandman” comics that have burned themselves in my brain; there are scenes from the “Sandman” Netflix series that left my brain as soon as they entered it.