Dead Boy Detectives, a series from Neil Gaiman about a detective agency staffed by ghosts, debuts on Netflix April 25. George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri are in the cast, Rexstrew’s Edwin playing the agency’s “brains” and Revri’s Charles “the brawn.” 

Both characters were killed by bullies at a British boarding school, one in the early 1900s and one in the 1980s. 

There are eight episodes. 

“Teenagers born decades apart who find each other only in death, Edwin and Charles are best friends and ghosts … who solve mysteries. They will do anything to stick together — including escaping evil witches, Hell and Death herself,” said Netflix. 

Edwin and Charles get some help from a clairvoyant named Crystal (Kassius Nelson) and her friend Niko (Yuyu Kitamura). 

The series is based on the DC Comics franchise The Sandman from Gaiman, who is an executive producer on the show. It is also part of what Netflix calls “The Sandman Universe,” which includes the series The Sandman and Lucifer. 

Gaiman described The Sandman comics on Netflix’s Tudum site as “more or less me as a boy.”

Dead Boy Detectives was developed for television by Steve Yockey, who is showrunner with Beth Schwartz. Both executive produce with Jeremy Carver, Sarah Schechter and Greg Berlanti. 

Max, then known as HBO Max, had ordered Dead Boy Detectives as a spinoff of Doom Patrol in 2021, but did not move forward on the series. 

“The friendship is the thing: that’s the reason to do the show,” Yockey told Tudum. “I think we’ve done it in a sort of Hardy Boys-on-acid kind of way. And so it maintains the anything-can-happen, odd construction of the comic book, but does it in a more TV-friendly way.”

A review in The Hollywood Reporter called Dead Boy Detectives “solid-but-not-sensational,” and “the sort of consistently likeable amusement that in Charles’s 1980s heyday might have become long-running appointment viewing — and that we in the 2020s get to enjoy as a zippy, satisfying binge.”

Other Gaiman works that became TV series include Good Omens on Prime Video and American Gods on Starz.