With less than a month away from the release of Netflix’s next DC series, we can exclusively report the runtime for Dead Boy Detectives. Will each episode be longer than their Doom Patrol Season 3 debut? Find out below.
What Are The ‘Dead Boy Detectives’?
The Dead Boy Detectives are a pair of fictional supernatural detectives, both dead themselves, who investigate paranormal events. The duo consists of Edwin Pain and Charles Rowland, two boys who were once students at a boarding school in which both died — Edwin in 1916 and Charles in 1990.
The duo first appeared in the Neil Gaiman comic The Sandman #25, where their origin story was given and they have since gone on to feature in several of their own comic series as well as other stories such as Doom Patrol Annual #2.
In other media, they made their live-action debut in Doom Patrol Season 3 Episode 3 where Ty Tennant (House of the Dragon) plays Edwin (with the altered last name of Payne) and Sebastian Croft plays Charles. Additionally, Madalyn Horcher plays Crystal Palace, an ally to the DBD and a living medium that can communicate with the dead.
This debut episode served as a backdoor trial for a pilot for the duo’s very own show, Dead Boy Detectives, which was revealed by Variety in September 2021. This is similar as a concept to how Doom Patrol was a direct backdoor pilot that spun off Titans, but is technically disconnected.
The one catch here is that Tennant and Sebastian were not set to return which would soon be confirmed when George Rexstrew (Paine) and Jayden Revri (Rowland) were cast as the eponymous Dead Boy Detectives with Kassius Nelson replacing Horcher as Crystal Palace.
Five months after this announcement, the series was ordered by HBO Max (since retitled Max). To continue this bizarre development, the series was then dropped by Max and then picked up by Netflix in early 2023.
How Long Is ‘Dead Boy Detectives’?
And now, approximately 32 months later, the series is about to arrive on Netflix and we can exclusively report the runtimes of each episode. Each episode runtime we are about to reveal will be listed in correspondence to the episode titles revealed in a WGA listing:
S1E1 “Pilot” is 56 minutes long
S1E2 “The Case of the Dandelion Shrine” is 52 minutes long
S1E3 “The Case of the Devlin House” is 52 minutes long
S1E4 “The Case of the Lighthouse Leapers” is 53 minutes long
S1E5 “The Case of the Two Dead Dragons” is 53 minutes long
S1E6 “The Case of the Creeping Forest” is 54 minutes long
S1E7 “The Case of the Very Long Stairway” is 57 minutes long
S1E8 “The Case of the Hungry Snake” is 56 minutes long.
As you can see, these episodes are pretty bulky and together provide a combined runtime of 7 hours and 21 minutes with an average runtime of 54.13 minutes an episode. Solid to say the least and longer than Doom Patrol’s “Dead Patrol” which was 53 minutes.
Is The Series Standalone?
Funnily enough, this isn’t the first DC creation from Neil Gaiman to find its home on Netflix… in fact, it isn’t even the second. The Sandman, the story about ethereal primordial gods who preside over various aspects of all experiences, was released on Netflix in August 2022 and was received very well fiscally and critically.
The show adapts the same comic series that birthed the Dead Boy Detectives in that medium but coincidentally, the show is set in the same universe as this iteration of Dead Boy Detectives with several characters crossing over in between series.
Furthermore, but disconnected, Neil Gaiman’s comic character Lucifer (based on the Christian representation of evil) received a television adaptation in 2016 from the network Fox (who also handled the DC series Gotham) but was cancelled after three seasons.
In an eerily similar fashion to Dead Boy Detectives, Lucifer was picked up by Netflix in 2018 and went on to finish its run with six seasons. And yet again, Lucifer as a character debuted in… you guessed it… The Sandman.
Dead Boy Detectives stars George Rexstrew as Edward Paine and Jayden Revri as Charles Rowland. They’re joined by Kassius Nelson as Crystal Palace, Briana Cuoco as Jenny the Butcher, Ruth Connell as the Night Nurse, Yuyu Kitamura as Niko and Jenn Lyon as Esther. The series will be streaming on Netflix on April 25, 2024. You can watch the trailer right now, below:
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