“Doctor Who” awaits another revolution

The BBC has announced that Doctor Who executive producer Chris Chibnall (photo, center) and star Jodie Whittaker (photo, right) will be attending. A trio of specials until next year would herald the pair’s departure from the longtime series. So now seems like the perfect time for Doctor Who to undergo the drastic overhaul he desperately needs. I do not agree with recent piece saying the series is to be put on hold for a while, but it is very clearly time for the series to evolve again.

Partly because Doctor Who under Chibnall was such a mess: the showrunner’s work before taking the job, while popular and award-winning, had always left me cold. My first appearance was somewhat appeased by the news of the production of the 11th series of the relaunched series. Chibnall also deserves credit for hiring the first two writers of color in the series almost sixty years the story. The fact that many episodes focus explicitly on material social history suggests a brilliant new direction for the series. The woman who fell to earth, too, was a start of overwhelming confidence and all looked good.

Then, Yes. As good as Chibnall is at the birth of truly inspired ideas, the quality of his execution is terrible. He struggled to flesh out the quartet of main characters and failed to offer them any real issues to deal with. And despite the era’s emphasis on diversity, the content of each episode seemed much more backward-looking. I have written about Chibnall often seeming to make the opposite argument to what he thinks he is. Unless he destined say that polite protest is the only good protest, Amazon’s treatment of its staff is good, in fact, and we can all benefit from the spoils of colonialism.

Naturally, the casting of a woman in the central role encouraged the usual petulance of those Internet corners. Unfortunately, I think the actors involved have all worked wonders in trying to make everything Chibnall writes believable from a distance. And the departure of Whittaker before she can work with another executive producer will be yet another tragically wasted opportunity at this time. I hope this bad faith review doesn’t force the production team to make a “safe” choice for the next Doctor.

The big secret of Doctor Who endurance is both the malleability of its premise and its talent for reinventing itself. Every few years, often as the show’s creative team changed, it became an almost entirely different show. You could argue that this lack of sentimentality has been the case since the series’ first change of mission, which occurred in its fifth episode. The revived show used a version of the Buffy the vampire slayer model since 2005, and it is starting to wear out a bit.

It didn’t help that while Series 11 was designed to avoid any heavy series backstory, Series 12 was sometimes incomprehensible to anyone except die-hard fans. Chibnall, after all, dedicated his series arc to validating a production blunder in an episode that aired Jan. 24, 1976. (And in so doing, made the Time Lord Doctor the equivalent of Jesus, contradicting everything we’ve learned over the past six decades.) Mainstream drama.

Unfortunately, the media landscape has changed and the competition has intensified beyond belief. The BBC no longer has a monopoly on the conversation the way it did – at least here in the UK – and is eclipsed by the streaming giants. Netflix, Amazon, Disney and others also have the wealth of offering the kind of creative freedom that once made the non-commercial BBC stand out from the crowd.

The knee-jerk reaction, I’m sure, will be to demand Doctor Who jump on the bandwagon driven by Marvel’s recent streaming shows. That would be a mistake, because Who’s at his best when he walks away from any genre of show that hits mainstream that year. Financially, the BBC cannot compete with these mega-franchises, but the quality of its writing and its unique sensibility can. The only thing the series could learn from these shows, however, is how to turn each episode into a an event.

This could mean that the show becomes a series of occasional specials with a longer duration, like a glorified movie of the week. Or it could, like the COVID-influenced 2021 season, be a shorter series of closely interconnected episodes. Chibnall may indeed stumble upon the model that helps revitalize the show in the future, but I’m personally hoping for something more drastic.

For example, if Doctor Who can’t succeed as a brilliant standalone hour-long drama, then why not revert to being a short soap opera series again? by netflix Russian doll and the BBC I can destroy you are two examples of (excellent) half-hour dramas that offer a break from the current model of prestige drama. It also helps that Doctor Who has been running in this format for 25 of its first 26 seasons, and features new – or to the least different – methods for structuring a story.

It can also ease the frenzy during its long second life on a streaming platform. Think about it: how many times have you dodged while watching a long episode of The crown because it is too much time to invest in your day, but you will happily burn four episodes of Brooklyn nine-nine without complaint. You could even ask Michaela Coel to write it down, although at this point I’m happy with someone not called Chris Chibnall.