The death of Doctor Who has been greatly exaggerated. Yes, the show’s been put on a hiatus of indeterminate length, showrunner Russell T. Davies and his production company Bad Wolf have been removed (or stepped down, depending on how descriptively kind you’re feeling), and we have no idea when it will return. The previously promised Christmas special has been canceled — and may have never existed in the first place? — and it feels increasingly unlikely we’ll ever find out the answer to that Billie Piper cliffhanger that closed season 15. Things definitely aren’t great right now, and it’s fair to be upset about that. But, despite the rampant catastrophizing that it feels like almost every entertainment and industry outlet appears eager to engage in, there’s also every reason to still feel optimistic about the show’s future.
Granted, that’s not necessarily easy right now, given, well… everything. After all, Doctor Who fans have been goingthrough it for the past year, as the BBC and Disney hedged their bets about the show’s future, Ncuti Gatwa departed the TARDIS much earlier than anyone expected, and one of the worst season finales in recent memory ended with an awkwardly plotted surprise regeneration/Hail Mary twist that was clearly never meant as its original conclusion. The much-ballyhooed Disney deal collapsed, and months passed with no word on the forthcoming holiday special we were all assured was coming. Heck, American viewers still haven’t even gotten to see The War Between the Land and the Sea! It’s been a whole lot, and Christmas literally getting canceled is just the icing on top of a particularly horrid cake.
But things aren’t as bad as they seem — or as some seemingly want them to be. First of all, the show hasn’t been canceled. It’s been put out to “competitive tender,” the fancy name for the BBC business process that will see various interested production companies bid to take over the making of the franchise, hopefully bringing new voices and new perspectives along with them. For what it’s worth, the corporation still seems remarkably firm in its commitment to the show and its audience, and has been since the post-Disney meltdown started. It seems… let’s just say, unlikely that that commitment has suddenly drastically changed, or that this restructuring is a secret, nefarious plot meant to sink the show rather than to find a way to stabilize it.
But Whovians, in general, are a melodramatic bunch (and I say that with all love, as I also spent some fairly significant time last week staring into the void in despair). It’s human nature to assume the worst when something you love is threatened, particularly after a year’s worth of speculation, frustration, anger, and repeated disappointment. It’s also true that no one involved in this mess has exactly covered themselves in glory, and outgoing showrunner Russell T. Davies now insisting that the Christmas episode he literally spent months teasing somehow never actually existed isn’t helping matters either. (Dude, just take the L! It happens!) But at the end of the day, maybe this is all just so much evidence that a completely fresh start is exactly what this franchise needs.
The fear there, of course, is that any brief pause to course correct will somehow once again spin out into the same kind of extended wilderness period that followed Sylvester MCoy’s Seventh Doctor run, a genuine cancellation in all but name. But, that’s probably a lot less likely than many think. Today’s television landscape is vastly different than the one that the show faced back in the 1980s, and Doctor Who is no longer a niche little British children’s show that could. It’s now a genuine global product, and a brand that goes well beyond a simple television program, with international distribution deals, extensive licensing agreements, and an endless stream of merchandise. (How many TARDIS-themed items are in your home?) A CBeebies animated series is still in development and Big Finish seems to be releasing more Doctor Who audio dramas than ever. In light of all this, there’s almost no way that the flagship series stays off the air for more than a few years, tops. But it can and probably should look quite a bit different when it does return.
Doctor Who, after all, is a series that is predicated on change. Doctors regenerate, companions leave, and enemies are vanquished only to reappear in occasionally upgraded or more colorful forms in the space of less than a season. It’s only right that the show itself does too from time to time, in ways that go beyond actors and title treatments. Let’s hope the show can find a way to take this opportunity to embrace this opportunity for a fresh start — thoroughly.
Look, the franchise owes a massive debt to Davies: he’s the man who brought the show back in 2005, returned to shepherd it through its 60th anniversary, and (unfortunately, rather disastrously) tried to turn the Disney partnership into a Marvel-style shared universe when everyone feared the BBC itself might collapse. But he’s also been taking it on the chin for months for a string of developments that aren’t entirely his fault. Recency bias seems to have convinced many that the Gatwa era was a complete failure, despite the fact that many of the same people bemoaning the (admittedly terrible!) “Wish World”/“The Reality War” two-parter had been hailing some of its episodes as among the best of modern Who. (See also “The Story & the Engine”, “73 Yards,” “Dot and Bubble,” “The Well,” and “Boom”.) But at this point, we’re all beating the same dead horse into the ground, which is perhaps the clearest sign possible that what Doctor Who needs most is an infusion of new blood.
After all, not only has Davies himself been showrunner twice, both Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, who helmed the show from 2010 to 2017 and 2018 to 2022 respectively, penned episodes during his run. (Chibnall, of course, wrote for Moffat’s Who as well.) Granted, those men have very different styles as writers and storytellers — both from Davies and each other — but they’re all essentially members of the same extended family, and have been part of the fabric of modern Who to varying degrees pretty much since the revival started.
In light of that, maybe it’s not really all surprising the show got a bit stagnant and overly wrapped up in its own mythology, and has struggled to find a way to appeal to audiences who weren’t already fully caught up on and invested in the franchise. Let a new team take over, one that owes no loyalty to what’s come before. Shake things up. Bring in writers who’ve never written for Doctor Who. (Maybe even some who grew up watching the revival.) Create new enemies and put fresh spins on old ones. Acknowledge the Doctor’s past without allowing the show to be paralyzed by it. (Something the RTD 2.0 era promised but never fully managed to do.) Embrace the idea of a true franchise regeneration, which gets the show back to the basics: A weirdo two-hearted alien exploring the stars in a blue police box, and reminding us all that being human is stil the greatest adventure of all.
It’s undeniable that this sudden hiatus sucks, and a world with the promise of no new Doctor Who in development is certainly a darker and less magical place than the one we all inhabited last week. But this isn’t the end. Like the Doctor himself, this franchise is a survivor, and it will bounce back as it always has. We’ll see each other again, and likely sooner than anyone expects. Don’t believe me? Trust the Doctor instead: “Everything ends, and it’s always sad, but everything begins again, too. And that’s always happy. Be happy.”
