Recently, Netflix have made a habit of picking up YA series only to drop them like hot potatoes. And the latest show hoping to go where great YA dramas like Lockwood & Co and The Bastard Son and the Devil Himself couldn’t – i.e. a second series – is Dead Boy Detectives.
Based in the world of The Sandman, the comic book created by Neil Gaiman that Netflix turned into a major series, our heroes are Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri), and they’re ghosts. Edwin died in the 1920s at boarding school; Charles died some six decades later.
United in the afterlife, they’ve founded a supernatural detective agency helping ghosts find peace, while also steering firmly clear of Death (the anthropomorphised version, played again by Kirby Howell-Baptiste from The Sandman). But things start getting hairy when they rescue an American girl, Crystal Palace (yep), from being possessed by a demon.
Crystal also happens to be a powerful psychic and quickly becomes a reluctant third party in their detective agency. And when those psychic powers alert her to a mystery across the pond, the gang find themselves making a trip to America to solve some ghostly cases in a sleepy Washington town.
These mysteries – one per episode in true procedural TV fashion – form the backbone of the show. The characters first appeared in The Sandman comics, and the show has the Gaiman hallmarks of quirky Brits stuck in America, lurking existential dread and a huge dollop of fantasy.
This being Gaiman, there is a lot of horror too. Gone are the days when YA shows meant sanitised gore – here, we see cats eating a man, heads exploding, people jumping to their deaths from a lighthouse tower and a man attacking his family with an axe. And that’s before we delve into the tragic backstories of the main characters.
All this sounds pretty grim, but fortunately, there’s plenty of humour to balance out said darkness, mostly in the form of the Cat King, a deliciously spiky Lukas Gage, who awakens an uncomfortable sort of longing in Edwin, as well as the wonderfully over the top Jenn Lyon as Esther, the local witch.
The central cast is great. Rexstrew and Revri are relative newbies, but their relationship forms the heart of the show and both do a great job of imbuing their characters with decades’ worth of baggage. Edwin is themore aloof, while Charles is chipper, always ready to crack a smile or a joke.
You believe that these two lost souls are mates, and they retain a lovely warmth even as their expanding friendship circle forces them to confront things they’d really rather not, such as Edwin’s sexuality and Charles’ blossoming romance with their pet medium. When paired with Kassius Nelson’s Crystal and Yuyu Kitamura’s oddball Niko (who joins the party later on), the ensemble is extremely watchable.
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As the series continues, the plot continues to thicken – sometimes at the expense of the ‘mystery of the week’ episodes – but that’s a minor niggle. Dead Boy Detectives is certainly entertaining fare: here’s hoping it, too manages to escape Death and return for a second season.
Dead Boy Detectives is streaming on Netflix