(Doctor) Who’s Next?

(Doctor) Who’s Next?

The TARDIS makes its way into an uncertain future with its usual wheezing groan.

If the past few months have demonstrated anything, it’s that legacy media properties have had a hard time lately finding purchase with modern audiences. Except in video games, mind you—the kids these days still love a lot of the same things that kids back in the day did. But Star Wars? Vintage toy lines? Star Trek? Superheroes? It’s all been a bit of an uphill struggle recently.

So, perhaps it should come as little surprise that the most vintage of all ongoing media properties has also hit a rough patch. Doctor Who, the BBC sci-fi series that debuted way back in 1963, has completely stalled out. The series capped its second season under the Disney+ banner almost exactly one year ago... and celebrated the anniversary with the announcement that the current showrunner (Russell T. Davies) and production company (Bad Wolf) will not continue forward with the show. On top of that, plans for a one-off Christmas special—a long-standing Who tradition!—have been canned as well. As for the future, well... ironically enough for a show about a time traveler, that’s all very uncertain right now.

However, all of that likely comes as no surprise to much of anyone paying attention. The past few years of Doctor Who have been pretty messy, to say the least. Some of that can be chalked up to COVID-related production issues, but there’s really no blaming circumstance on how poorly things went during its Disney run. The show spent two and a half seasons setting up intriguing concepts and seemingly building toward grand spectacles, only for all of those efforts to fizzle out. Despite featuring some individual episodes as inventive as the franchise has ever seen in its six-plus decades (such as “Dot and Bubble” and “Lux”), the overall production failed to stick the landing.

Supposedly, a lot of the show’s recent troubles had to do with behind-the-scenes drama, which (it is rumored) caused costar Millie Gibson to leave the series much sooner than planned... but not before her character, Ruby, had been built up as the central figure of a multi-season story arc. It’s not impossible for a show to survive a load-bearing actor’s departure; Babylon 5 spent its entire first season establishing leading man Commander Sinclair as the keystone to the central galactic conflict only for actor Michael O’Hare to step away for health reasons, and yet it made its pivot with shocking aplomb. Doctor Who, not so much.

That came as a particular disappointment given the pedigree of the creative team behind the past few seasons: Davies and Bad Wolf revived Doctor Who 20 years ago by handily avoiding all the mistakes that tripped up their Disney run. The 2000s-era Who (NuWho, if you like) gave new viewers a fresh jumping-on point for the series that required no knowledge whatsoever of the previous 26 seasons of stories and characters. When classic elements from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s did appear, they arrived in a measured fashion that made their significance clear but didn’t require prior knowledge of the older stories. Consider the 2005 episode “Dalek,” which introduced the show’s most iconic monster to new audiences to tremendous effect. It emphasized the Doctor’s long, antagonistic history with the omnicidal creatures while selling the threat by contrasting Christopher Eccleston’s frantic, spit-flecked terror against the lone, captive Dalek’s quiet cunning.

By contrast, Davies’ most recent run constantly stumbled over itself in service of nostalgia—not only for the series’ archival past, but also Davies’ own best moments. When iconic villains appeared again, it was usually in a baffling fashion: deep-cut references to fan-favorite obscurities like Sutekh and Omega, explained terribly for newcomers, and handled in \ways that repulsed the few die-hard fans who got the reference. Visually, the show never looked better, and actor Ncuti Gatwa brought phenomenal new depth to the lead character, but those high points only served to emphasize how badly the show fumbled overall.

Doctor Who isn’t dead, of course. The franchise makes way too much money for the BBC for it to simply go away. But it is being shopped around in hopes of finding a new business partner (and new creative team) to give it a fresh direction. Which is fine and good; the secret of Doctor Who’s longevity has been its ability to reinvent itself as needed. From the beginning, in fact: An educational program headed by an exasperated old man turned into a secret agent show headed by a dashing action hero with a stylish convertible in the space of just a few years. Doctor Who’s ever-growing history and lore offer writers a fantastic backdrop to riff on... the problem comes when, as with the most recent seasons, the scripts fall into the trap of mining the past for nostalgia as opposed to using it as a springboard for something new. The show’s corny proto-Borg monster, the Cyberman, are never interesting when used on their own, and when the show trots them out once per season it mostly just guarantees that there’ll be at least one boring story per season. But when the Cybermen become a framing device in which to explore the Doctor’s inability to prevent the death of the companions and friends he’s promised to keep safe? They’re devastating.

The show seems to have wandered off course and forgotten how all of that works over the past decade, so a hard reset seems in order. Which, again, is fine. Doctor Who spent 15 years in limbo before Davies and Eccleston brought it roaring back to become one of those most popular shows in the world. And, honestly, Who always seems to be at its best and most creative when it’s up against the ropes. The old ’80s episodes look unbelievably cheap by modern standards... because they were! But those flimsy-looking shot-to-tape productions from the tail end of the ’80s, when the BBC was in the process of attempting to kill Doctor Who once and for all by starving it of resources, contain some of the absolute best stories from the entire 60-plus-year span of the franchise.

Doctor Who doesn’t need a Disney-sized budget to be interesting; in fact, it’s usually a lot more interesting without those resources. It just needs creative leads who can capture the pioneering sense of invention of the show’s best years—not to rehash those moments or sigh, “Remember when?” but instead to treat the show’s past as a creative vector for something new. And maybe, just maybe, if the show’s next leads can pull it off, all of those other legacy franchises that have been struggling for success lately can swipe an idea or two about how to rebuild themselves for new audiences as well.