Sooner or later Doctor Who will be taken off our screens again. It won’t happen under Moffat and it’s unlikely to happen under whoever replaces him, whoever that may be. But it will happen. The programme has already been back on television for eight years. It can’t continue indefinitely. Even if it’s for three or four years it’ll disappear.
And when it does disappear from our screens I think it’s currently running the risk of being looked on as a broken show in much the same way as the ’89 incarnation was. It’ll be for different reasons of course. In place of wobbly sets people will talk of wibbly wobbly plotting (see what I did there?). That’s something that the next showrunner could fix, but something tells me they won’t. Even if they move away from Moff’s time-tangling shenanigans I can’t anyone creating a strong enough identity for the show to rid it of the image the current man in charge has created.
Which will almost certainly lead to Doctor Who being remembered as a convoluted, complex show about time travel paradoxes. Which it’s not of course. But not all of the original series was badly made. Most importantly the final three years of the original series were actually pretty well put together. But because of a few dodgy episodes and bad decision twenty-six seasons are remembered by the general populace as being pretty ropey television.
Sunday, 25 August 2013
That Doctor Who Blog: Future Failure
That Doctor Who Blog: Future Failure:
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This may not go down well, but I feel that Doctor Who will go off the television in the next few years because...it's just another "genre" show.
ReplyDeleteSay what you will about the original Series, but it was very much its own show. Other shows would copy it, and it kept changing to something new. Part of its demise was its inability to properly evolve in the 80's. The TV Movie didn't really take off because, while it was very good, there was nothing that really set it apart.
In 2005 Doctor Who was something new. Today it's a much better show than under RTD, but it doesn't really stand out. There are lots of other similar shows. Sooner or later someone will realise it has no reason to exist other than it's called "Doctor Who".
I would be happy to see Doctor Who cancelled. I got into Who in 1990. The Wilderness Years were a good time. A second wilderness era would do much to re-vitalize the franchise.
DeleteYes, the show will be cancelled eventually and it is due to the current showrunner. Each year more plot threads are introduced only to have half of them forgotten. This frustrates me and the only reason I'm still here is when things got bad in the classic series, you could always hope for the better when new people came in to run things.
ReplyDeleteBut things are different now. Moffat's mucked up the works and I'm not sure if there's anyone out there that can fix it without doing a total reboot.
Thanks for dropping in and commenting. You are probably right.
DeleteWhen I consider the wealth of great writing, acting, stories and overall production done for Dr. Who by Big Finish, I remain hopeful that the televised series can recover the same inventiveness mixed with faithfulness. Big Finish also embraces a much wider concept of Who, including for example Bernice, Iris, the novels and the comics.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your thoughts. The Virigin novels era was also a creative time for Doctor Who.
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