Yet, amid this very welcome Gaiman-is-suddenly-everywhere trend, we’ve somehow all managed to ignore the project of his that’s most overdue for a lavish, expensive on-screen reimagining: Neverwhere. An urban fantasy that follows the story of an everyday young man who finds himself transported to the mysterious world of London Below when he stops to help an injured girl who turns out to be more than she seems, Neverwhere is peak Gaiman, grounding its wildly fantastical story in a familiar world that feels all too normal and human, only with a dusting of the magical on top.
London Below embraces the lost elements of the city we’re all familiar with—bits of forgotten lore and history, broken objects, fractured or lost souls who have fallen through the gaps in our reality, whether by choice or accident—and mixes them with otherworldly literalism to create an intriguing underworld that exists just beneath the city’s streets.
But although Neverwhere was first published in 1996, it did not begin its life as a novel. In an odd (and uncommon) reversal, it was first a six-part BBC television series for which Gaiman wrote the screenplay alongside Sir Lenny Henry. The book that followed was Gaiman’s first solo novel (Good Omens, co-written with Terry Pratchett, hit shelves six years earlier) and was meant to serve as an official novelization of the TV show. It turned out to be a bit more than that. The novel expands and reshuffles some of the lore introduced in the television series, adds new scenes, and restores various elements of Gaiman and Henry’s original idea that had to be changed or cut for the TV version. (The author has spoken before about how the absence of specific things in the show was one of the reasons he wrote the book in the first place.)
To be clear, it’s not like the 1996 Neverwhere series is bad. Far from it, in fact. Sure, it feels more than a little dated now, but the show worked wonders with what was clearly a very limited budget, unabashedly embracing the high fantasy elements and sprawling, complicated fictional universe that have proven so popular today but which were frequently and openly sneered at in the late 1990s. (Sorry, guys, the nerds did inherit the Earth, eventually.)
Wildly imaginative and full of inventive, entertaining characters—Paterson Joseph’s over-the-top Marquis de Carabas, Peter Capaldi’s exquisitely coiffed Angel Islington, and the devilishly creepy evil assassin duo of Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandermar are just a few of the reasons to tune in—it’s evident from the story’s opening frames that Neverwhere is something special, even if the final product doesn’t quite manage to live up to the scope of Gaiman and Henry’s vividly imagined original world.
The BBC Radio 4 adaptation from 2013 comes a bit closer to capturing some of that magic, bolstered by the specific, indescribable alchemy that is radio drama in general, the power of listener imagination, and a truly stacked voice cast that includes big name stars ranging from James McAvoy and Natalie Dormer to Benedict Cumberbatch, Bernard Cribbins, and Christopher Lee. But even at its most affecting, it’s hampered by the fact that it’s not the visual, onscreen version we all wish it was. (Just imagine Cumberbatch rocking that Capaldi-style Islington hair.)
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Henry has spoken before about his and Gaiman’s issues with the original and the fact that the moment for a remake might finally have arrived. “We’ve both got problems with the show. It was a bit wobbly sets, it was shot on video and we would, of course, have liked it to look like a Bond film. What we were given to make it, I think we did really well,” he told Den of Geek in 2017. “I remember showing the trailer to the guy who was running BBC Two at the time, and it blew him away! But..I think now with things like Netflix and Black Mirror and the reboot of Doctor Who, they’d have a better sense of it now. Maybe its time has come?” (Gaiman, for the record, has indicated his interest in seeing a new version of Neverwhere as recently as November of 2023.)