Pour one out for the first hit Sandman TV show: Lucifer

polygon.com:

There’s a lot to enjoy in Netflix’s The Sandman series. The show is good! The comic is great! It’s rich with meaty allusions ripe for discovery. It’s a story with fascinating mysteries and wonderful messages.

It’s also created a great situation for me personally, one where I get to point out that Lucifer of the TV show Lucifer and Lucifer of The Sandman are the same character.

And I don’t mean because of the Bible.

In case you’re not familiar with Lucifer, it’s the Tom Ellis-starring dramedy that ran three seasons on Fox and three more on Netflix. And if you are familiar with the show that’s equal parts detective procedural, supernatural drama, and love story, you could still be unaware of its connection to DC Comics’ The Sandman.

Lucifer stands as a work of its own, but its central framing — that Satan got tired of ruling in hell and quit to run a piano bar in Los Angeles — is DC Comics canon. And the story that made that DC Comics canon is in the pages of The Sandman.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for The Sandman comic, I guess? It’s… very old, though.]

Viewers who have finished the first season of The Sandman on Netflix were left with Lucifer — played by Gwendoline Christie — swearing vengeance on the lord of Dreams for making her look like a chump in front of every demon in hell. Lucifer even has a plan, and in the comics, we know exactly what that is.

It’s to abdicate rule of hell and open a piano bar in Los Angeles. The vengeance part is where he gifts Dream the keys to hell, making him the owner of a piece of metaphysical real estate so valuable other entities are willing to threaten his life over it — which initiates the bulk of the plot of The Sandman’s third story arc. But that’s beside the point, which is that