The BBC wants to bring new Doctor Who to Stranger Things level
Showrunner Russell T. Davies teases the upcoming season of Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa in a new profile
Aux News BBC
If you’re wondering how Doctor Who lured back Russell T. Davies, the writer responsible for re-launching the show in 2005, the answer is money. Not just his salary, mind you, but the new big budget the BBC got out of partnering with Disney+. “They said, ‘We want to make Doctor Who bigger. We want to take it to a streamer. We want to go worldwide. We want it to have a bigger budget. And we want it to be up there with Stranger Things and Star Trek and the Marvel shows,’” Davies told Entertainment Weekly of that initial meeting to return to the Whoniverse. “We think that it’s good enough, and we believe in the show to know that it can have that heft, weight, and swagger.’”
Davies is on the record that the Disney move was the best outcome for the quintessentially British show. “I had already said in interviews that I think Doctor Who will have to become a co-pro, there’s no way the BBC is going to fund that,” he said on a recent podcast appearance (per Deadline). “You’ve also got to look in the long term at the end of the BBC, which is somehow, surely, undoubtedly on its way in some shape or form. What is Doctor Who going to do then? You have to prepare for that.”
Now that the future of Doctor Who is secure (for now), Davies is ready to take some big swings. The Entertainment Weekly feature on the upcoming fourteenth season (which is being rebranded, at its new home, as the first) contains some juicy tidbits about Ncuti Gatwa’s run as the Doctor. For one thing, Davies was inspired by the Jodie Whittaker plot The Timeless Child to create the character of Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who is an orphan. Now that the Doctor can no longer claim the Time Lords as his family of origin, both characters will be trying to figure out where they came from: “That story’s going to be the spine of the whole show,” Davies hinted.
Other fun details include returns from Bonnie Langford’s ’80s companion Mel and Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart. Ruby and the Doctor will meet the Beatles at Abbey Road, and that another former Who showrunner, Steven Moffat, has penned a “top-secret, Hitchcockian” episode for the new season. As previously teased, Jonathan Groff will join the show for a Bridgerton-esque outing, and Drag Race star Jinkx Monsoon will “debut as a malicious, music-manipulating villain.” And of course, there’s the fact that Millie Gibson is not being replaced, and will feature alongside Varada Sethu in the second season, which is currently filming: “We’re heading into season 2, and my God, Ruby Sunday is important to that,” Davies assured fans. “There’s good stuff to come.”
38 Comments
Doctor Who with a budget seems somewhat antithetical to the shoestring effects that were part of the charm of the classic series. But have to change with the times I suppose
Exactly, I like my Doctor Who cheap and silly. I want to see the same quarry as every other planet. I want the aliens to be strangely wearing the same costumes as whatever big budget historical drama the BBC in the next studio over(Oh look, its the Space Romans, next week its the Space Victorians).
As long as Doctor Who remains British I don’t care too much if they increase the budget a bit but it certainly doesn’t really get at the heart of what the show actually is & should be
Came to say the exact same thing! The overall slickness of Doctor Who from Eccelston-onward (I realize it’s gotten even slicker in recent years) has kept me at an arm’s length from it, even as I thought the actors portraying the Doctor have been uniformly excellent.
My first-ever glimpse of ‘Doctor Who’ was the closing moments of the ‘Power of Kroll’ 4th Doctor serial which showed what appeared to be a giant rubber squid attacking a tinkertoy oil rig in a bathtub. I immediately snapped to attention and had to get more, stat. Even though it’s cheap…even laughable at times…what the creators did to stretch the budgets showcase their creativity and spirit. Much in the same way that the original Terminator, with all of its rear-projection and stop motion, still sparkles for me (tho I love Terminator 2 as well, so the comparison doesn’t quite make it).
I dig what I’ve seen from Gatwa thus far so I’ll give this a shot but yeah, I generally like my beer cold, my coffee black, and my Who cheap, baby.
I enjoy Newish Who but the show was at its best in the seventies when it was cheap, campy & strange.
Exactly. I grew up watching Tom Baker as the Doctor (on PBS where British shows used to be shown in the US before people realized there was actual money to be had) and was just fine with those 1970s effects. Even today when I see a rerun of a Tom Baker or Peter Davison episode I think they are charming.
Fear not. Based on the episodes of Gatwa’s run that have aired so far, they’ve managed to spend the money on extremely good special effects that still look absolutely ridiculous.
That is good to hear
It will do better on Disney+ rather than BBC America given how much BBC America has fallen the past few years. I believe that the only original show they have left is the Graham Norton Show. It seems like they’ve replaced endless Star Trek: TNG repeats with Bones repeats.
I get the thought process, but the low budget feel is a part of the reason why people like Who. It is similar to modern Trek for me. Yes, it looks great but I miss the feeling of stuff like TNG and DS9.
Were TNG and DS9 low budget for their time?
Probably in the upper tiers as far as TV budgets went, but that was still way less that movies and they were making 26 episodes a year, not the 8-10 shows these days produce.
Strange New Worlds gets the Star Trek feeling right for the most part because they write it like past Star Trek series. The big budget effects are just a cherry on top.
Contrast this to Discovery and even though it has similar big budget effects, it doesn’t feel as much like Star Trek because it’s not written like past series.
That may be true for Classic Who viewers, but I doubt that many people who jumped on board with Nu-Who are longing for crappier production values.
Doctor Who was already all of those things ten years ago. If you have your own section on the Hot Topic website, you’ve made it.Really though, Stranger Things, Star Trek, and Marvel TV are three fairly different properties. One is a fairly recent entry to the pop culture zeitgeist, the next a long running SciFi staple with a devoted fanbase, and the last is a television branch of a multifaceted media phenomenon. And Doctor Who basically is all of those things already and has been for some time. If Disney wants to impress me, how about streaming some Big Finish stuff? At least that’s a bit harder to come by stateside.
Yep, basically when BBC America got the show and we got same day releases in the US finally it was super big. That was right around the 50th anniversary
Actually, Doctor Who got “big” in 2005 when it was resurrected. It was broadcast on the SyFy network on American Cable. I grew up during the Peter Davison era; he’s “my” Doctor. I watched every Saturday on WUNC. I happened to learn of the new series because I caught a commercial for it on tv. Suddenly, it seemed that Doctor Who was a big production.
It started on the Syfy Network but their deal didn’t kick in until after the first full series wrapped(with Eccleston) in the UK. They also broadcast it 3 months later so we got the Christmas episode in March, if I recall. SyFy showed it but never really gave it the love it deserved and it also showing several months later then the BBC broadcast was just silly. During that time I just sailed the high seas to get episodes when they showed in the UK. BBC America got it with a same day release and that was the kick off season with Smith where they started with an episode that took place in the US(and it was actually filmed there, with I think was a first for the show). That is when I felt it really was huge. Magazine covers and new coverage beyond the normal nerdy scifi sphere. Like someone else said, that is when I saw merch at Hot Topics
Everyone in the comments seems to be missing RTD’s biggest concern here: He thinks the BBC as we know it is doomed.
People being happy with Doctor Who’s pre-Disney status quo is nice, but the BBC isn’t going to be able to fund Doctor Who at even its previous levels, if RTD is correct. (I don’t know enough about BBC funding and the politics around it to know if he is.)
The concern is that the fee which funds the BBC is going to be eliminated in the near future, forcing the BBC to get funded privately like the other British TV networks like ITV.
The license fee has been an open sore for a while, but the culture wars are a huge part of that nowadays too, so he’s probably not all that far off.
Do Brits need to still pay a TV tax if they are not getting over the air broadcasts? If you have a TV and just use streaming apps do you still need to pay? I wonder if that is cutting into the BBCs budget(since my understanding is the TV tax pays for the BBC)
The rules have been changing a bit over the last ten years to keep up. I believe in the UK, if you watch just about anything that can be considered “TV” – including streaming, dvd/bluray, BBC iplayer on demand, etc. – and if you do so on any device (not just a TV, but laptop, tablet, etc.), then you have to pay the license fee.In Ireland, it’s very similar, but I don’t think they’ve closed the “device loophole” yet, so if you don’t have a TV but watch on laptops, etc., you don’t have to pay the fee. I imagine that’ll change soon.
The BBC is stuffed in the short term. Last year the government agreed that the licence fee could rise with inflation, so the BBC made it’s commitments for the coming year on that basis. Then the government reneged on its promise. At the time, inflation was 10%, so the BBC is functionally broke.
This year should see a new government, who will be more BBC friendly, so maybe that bullet could still be dodged.
RTD is completely correct. Unless there’s a massive change in the way people think about public broadcasting — and I don’t think there will be — the BBC as a publicly-funded organization is doomed.And he’s been very smart about how he and the other execs involved set up the Disney deal. As an independent production (via Bad Wolf Studios), losing the BBC would be a change, but not a huge one. At this point I think the BBC just pays a broadcast fee to air the episodes; funding is largely from BBC Studios (the commercial arm of the BBC) and D.
I can understand why Davies wants to go big while he can before the door on big streaming budgets slams shut very soon and I don’t doubt he sincerely believes he’s doing it for the fans. Maybe it will bring in some new viewers and maybe older fans will get a kick out of it. He does seem to appreciate the ephemerality of the moment and that the situation wirh the BBC could well mean drastically tighter budgets in the near future and that the Disney deal is about preserving the show for future incarnations.
I honestly have not been interested in NuWho for a while now. I just have found the show boring. The fact that every other companion is a mysterious orphan or magical girl got old when Clara aka Leaf girl was the next one. The whole The Doctor isn’t actual a Timelord thing bugs me too, because it feels like something that was so part of his character for a long time. I know The Doctor has been reconned a million times over the shows long history but I feel like their Time Lord status has not been screwed around with in decades. Anyways I am sure I will watch it eventually just not super excited about it
Eh, my question has always been, where are all the other time lords? They speficially state that they watched over the universe for a billion years, traveling all over, watching everything. Yes. They died/were sealed away. But they are time travelers, they may all be dead in the doctors personal timeline/frame of reference since its in the doctors past but to all the others, that moment hasnt happened yet. So never seeing another timelord has always struck me as just being lazy.
I think it was implied that because the Time War spanned and threatened all of reality, pretty much all Time Lords were involved (some even resurrected, like Rassilon and the Master) whether they wanted to be or not, and it was only the Doctor and the Master who escaped before the Time Lords were trapped in the timelock. Hence the Doctor still being essentially the last of his kind.
Also I don’t know if it’s ever been specifically stated that the Time Lords traveled all over the universe to watch over it. If anything it’s been implied that the Time Lord council watched over the universe from their chambers on Gallifrey. This kind of non-intervention approach is sort of what set the Time Lords apart from renegade Time Lords like the Doctor, the Master, the Meddling Monk, etc.
The Doctor Who universe doesn’t quite work that way. You have to think of time like dimensions. For instance, and this is weird, if you were to travel to Gallifrey at any point in time before the Time War, you would always find the exact same Time Lords there until they regenerated and then it would be those Time Lords not matter when you arrived. This is why there are no more Time Lords, why you can’t (technically) travel to the Dark Times or the end of time, and why the first law of Time prevents Time Lords for meeting themselves (think Laws of physics not laws of the land). Now, of course all this stuff can and had been broken in the fictional confines of the franchise, but that it basically the way it works at default.
I hate the Chibnall era with a passion, but I think it was either stated or implied that The Doctor is still a Time Lord, just not an indigenous Gallifreyan (i.e. Shobogan).
They’re an alien from another dimension that was brought to Gallifrey, experimented on, but raised and trained as a Time Lord.
Personally I think it’s an unnecessary retcon, and I hate the way Chibnall wrote it, but it is what it is.
As opposed to OldWho where every other companion was a mysterious orphan or magical girl?
A bigger budget, while not a panacea, can certainly help a production along. That’s especially true for a sci-fi show, even one for which low-rent effects have been part of the experience for so long.But if they don’t use some of that budget to expand the scope of the creatives who will be involved, it’s not going to land (IMO). Just having whiz-bang special effects while still drawing from the same pool of writers and directors won’t bring any improvements in the most important part of the show – the one that made all those lousy special effects tolerable in the first place, the stories.If they’d given Chris Chibnall a $50B budget for every episode his run still would’ve been garbage.
I thought the latter run of Matt Smith episodes were supposedly bigger budget, more cinematic, etc.
If anything they proved nothing beats good writing, so as long as RTD has that then he can spend as much money as he likes.
I feel like a lot of Nu-Who especially since the BBC America partnership (Mid Matt Smith) onwards has actually looked really good in production and effects. You can tell in some eps theyre working with some limits and effects on occasion have been shonky but you can say that even with marvel budget films.
As some have said, what’s vital for Who is good writing so hope bigger budget means attracting interesting talent behind the camera as well as more money to put into sets, sfx etc. It’s a funny comparison to make with stranger things etc. I think Who is already at star trek levels even if it’s not as known by the average person as star trek is.
“We as one of the BBC’s flagship productions must leave the BBC because the BBC is about to go down!” seems like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, like many public broadcasters the BBC is under attack from the right. You don’t help by deserting the ship…
Quick, someone summarize the 875 previous episodes for me.