Jodie Whittaker and Showrunner Chris Chibnall To Leave 'Doctor Who' (doctorwho.tv) 131
Slashdot reader Dave Knott quotes the BBC's Doctor Who site: Having been in charge of the TARDIS since filming for the Thirteenth Doctor began in 2017, Showrunner Chris Chibnall and the Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, have confirmed they will be moving on from the most famous police box on Earth.
With a six-part Event Serial announced for the autumn, and two Specials already planned for 2022, BBC One has now asked for an additional final feature length adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor, to form a trio of Specials for 2022, before the Doctor regenerates once more.
With a six-part Event Serial announced for the autumn, and two Specials already planned for 2022, BBC One has now asked for an additional final feature length adventure for the Thirteenth Doctor, to form a trio of Specials for 2022, before the Doctor regenerates once more.
Inclusivity! (Score:3, Funny)
Good. It's past time we had a trans attack helicopter ( pronouns: ze/ver ) Doctor.
Re:Inclusivity! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don’t mind her, I think she’s been handed absolute garbage scripts. I welcome the loss of the show runner, just wish Jodi had more of a chance.
Re:Inclusivity! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Inclusivity! (Score:5, Interesting)
In any long running franchise, if your scripts don't hit it out of the park then your phase of the franchise looks like a failure. That's because fans' memories of the early days of franchise are tainted by survivor bias. People remember Star Trek TNG as if every episode was *Inner Light*, but there were a lot of scripts like *Sub Rosa* -- half baked drek shoveled into the insatiable maw of production then shoved out the door so the airing schedule wouldn't have a hole in it.
If we watched the first season of TNG with the expectations memories of TNG set for following series, TNG wouldn't have survived it's fourth episdoe, *Code of Honor* (the infamous space negro episode).
Really the only artistically satisfying way to manage a franchise like Dr. Who would be to run it for a couple years and then let it lie fallow for a couple years while you prepare to hit the next installment out of the park. You can't keep something like that alive by airing an endless stream of more or less adequate shows.
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First TNG (or The Love Boat in Space) sucked balls. Everybody knew that at the time. The "I hate Wesley Crusher" fan club should have been the dead give away.
Second, there's no rose color glasses memories of Doctor Who - you can watch the old shows now. Pluto TV and BritBox and occasionally BBC America show classic Doctor Who. So you can see what shows made in the 60's, 70's and '80s were like. Shows in the '60s and '70s were actually good. Much better script
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In any long running franchise, if your scripts don't hit it out of the park then your phase of the franchise looks like a failure. That's because fans' memories of the early days of franchise are tainted by survivor bias. People remember Star Trek TNG as if every episode was *Inner Light*, but there were a lot of scripts like *Sub Rosa* -- half baked drek shoveled into the insatiable maw of production then shoved out the door so the airing schedule wouldn't have a hole in it.
What are you talking about? Chris Chibnall wrote some of my least favorite Doctor Who episodes in terms of structure and plot. When it was announced that he would take over as showrunner and head writer, I was concerned about the quality of the show and scripts.
Re:Inclusivity! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't mind her? She was voted to be the best Dr. Who of all time. Believable right?
Never mind the fact that the season had the worst ratings and viewership of all time. The writers made the Dr. originally born a female, and then wrote "her" out from even being a real time-lord. The writing was so bad that it destroyed the series, and it's like the writers weren't even fans of the show. They kept eluding to the Dr. becoming female in previous seasons and they could have done so much more with it. Instead, they just made it woke garbage that rehashed previous stories. Wasn't unique, was boring, and was just throw-away.
As far as I am concerned the show is pretty much dead. It's gonna be hard to come back from this since they not only gave away the Dr.'s mysterious origin, but ruined it by allowing woke politics to take precedence over a good story.
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allowing woke politics to take precedence over a good story.
Have you seen that step-free access everywhere? We are so screwed if the Daleks invade.
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I appreciated the joke, even if others moded it down to -1...
Re:Inclusivity! (Score:4, Insightful)
Worse ratings that then 80s? Hard to believe.
Or maybe just because in the 80s there were only 4 TV channels to choose from, but even so the ratings for the last few seasons with McCoy were dire.
By the way, the Doctor is not just a real Time Lord, they are the original Time Lord. The story was retconned to be that the Doctor was from another dimension, mysteriously arrived on Gallifrey and was adopted by a scientist who learned the secret of regeneration from her. All the other Time Lords were given regeneration artificially.
Complaining about retcons and continuity and lore in Who is ridiculous though. It's been completely trashed already. Remember that time when Romana casually regenerated into a bunch of different bodies before settling on one, like she was trying on different outfits?
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And can't we say that some retconning is just going too far? Hard to avoid some with a sci-fi show that began before we landed on the moon and is still going, but deciding the First Doctor wasn't the first so they could feminize his backst
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Why is it beyond the pale? And why do anything in Who, why is making them originally (maybe) female an issue?
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Was the change driven by the needs of the beloved story, or external and unrelated politics? Because it sure as hell feels like the latter, which would mean the program ceased to be pure entertainment a
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I sort of want to agree with you, but I gave up on this most recent Doctor after, I think, the second DVD from Netflix; the first was atrocious, I kept opening a book while the shows were playing, and hoped the second DVD would be better. It wasn't. Plot holes, logic holes, and the way-too-woke nonsense (Guns are filthy, it's so much honorable to kill en mass; oh he's just having a bad day and is not really horrible).
I haven't watched one since. So I sort of feel like I have no right to write down my opi
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Thanks for the name. Looked him up on Wikipedia, and ....
"He strongly felt that people working on the programme (notably Williams, script editor Douglas Adams and star Tom Baker) had stopped taking the show seriously: it was parodying science fiction, rather than presenting serious storylines. He also believed that Williams had allowed Baker too much influence on the show's direction, rather than confronting Baker over his increasingly comedic acting style. Nathan-Turner, together with new script editor Ch
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I agree; I don't have a problem with Whittaker's work ( although not my favorite by far ).
I think they need to get back to the basics; tell good stories and make it fun. Don't preach or lecture.
Sad, missed opportunity (Score:2)
Yeah, I think she could be a good Dr. Who with show runners and writers that had any idea what Dr Who, the show, was about... what a waste of a good actor.
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She’s just not a good actor. That black woman in the light house was onscreen for 5 minutes and was already a better doctor. Please let her take over.
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I agree. The problem isn't Whittaker, but the fact that each episode reminds me of Scooby Doo. Granted Doctor Who is targeted towards children, it was a bit too far.
However my view on Doctor Who, is the same I have with Star Trek, and Star Wars. These were show universes of a different eras. To continue them you play a continuous loosing game of either being too campy, or too Woke. Nostalgia is a cruel emotion, you fondly remember crap and are blind to it seeing it again. But if it is new your adult br
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If they weren't so much a money grab, I would say they should just put the effort into new shows for the next generation.
That's what they do, because us older viewers tend not to spend much money on these things. We don't buy the toys or the DVDs or the comics, at least not as often as the younger viewers. These very long running shows have to constantly re-invent themselves.
It actually killed Who off before in the 80s, when it tried to be down with the youths. It worked very well for Trek though. People were very upset when they put a female councillor on the bridge (although Roddenberry had planned that for the original ser
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Re:Diversity does not work. Neither does pluralism (Score:4, Insightful)
What are you talking about? "Change" an "existing" character?
The Doctor is not "a" single character. There are fundamental changes with every reincarnation. What's in the Doctor's pants is no more a "change" than every other aspect of the Doctor that has changed before.
There are shows where gender-bending the primary character is going to be out of place. Doctor Who is NOT one of them.
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The point is there wre already strong female characters the writers could have used without taking a "male" character and making it "female" - as if an established or original female character would not be good enough.
Jesus fucking Christ, they already had the Rani, renegade female time lord more dangerous than the master, but no they had to change the master into a female! For fucks sake.
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There are shows where gender-bending the primary character is going to be out of place. Doctor Who is NOT one of them.
It is when there's no point to it.
There was NOTHING specifically female about that version of the doctor as far as I could stomach to watch it. Could've been a man and everything else still would've been the same.
So what for?
In writing, things need to serve a purpose. This one didn't serve any purpose inside the story or universe. It was some kind of audience pleaser. And at that it failed terribly.
#WOKEWASHING (Score:2)
On top of that, having every script be designed to give BBC an opportunity to highlight some favored cu
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There has been a rather long canon in Who that when a Timelord regenerates it doesn't have to be their current gender.
The Doctor is rarely the strongest or the biggest, not had their been a plot where he needed a Penis to solve a problem. The sex traits of the actor have little to do with the plot.
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Bat Woman, Super Girl, Wonder Woman... All Female Rehashes of their male counterparts... they've been doing this for ages. They don't develop women as their own thing, they just make it a woman-ified version of the male superhero.
Wonder Woman?
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I agree.
In a way it's a shame that she's going at the same time as the change of show runner. With a better scriptwriter, I believe that she would shine.
The trouble with the current set up is that the moralising is laid on with a shovel, at the expense of the natural flow. OK, give positive messages now and then, but don't sacrifice the pace, direction and narrative flow.
I've been watching it since the William Hartnell era -- the effects may not have been that "special" in the 60s/70s/80s but the story lin
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It's rose-tinted.
There were some seriously awful storylines back then. Don't get me wrong, there was great stuff too, but there was also a massive amount of cheesy, ridiculous, garbage writing.
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I agree wholeheartedly. I think she was just fine but I think the scripts have been trash, almost from the beginning. Chibnall seemed more interested in preaching than just telling some fun stories. Don't get me wrong, the whole episode about the partition of India was incredibly fascinating as I hadn't thought about how all that came about but most of the rest were garbage. I can only hope we'll get a "Bobby Ewing" and The Doctor will discover that the previous seasons were actually the Dream Lord's work,
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Re: Inclusivity! (Score:2)
While Chibnall and BBC leadership bear the majority of the blame, she was happy playing up being the token gender swap. It's difficult to imagine scripts that would have made her look good given her acting performances in the role.
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I'll never have a good as-in-fair-to-her or good as-in-positive opinion of her as the Doctor thanks to the show having been handed off to some critical-theory twit who shat all over it before flushing it down the tubes.
Who'd have thought they'd pick a showrunner so bad that people
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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by having Chibnall directing the thing
Good Riddance... (Score:4, Insightful)
Horrible Horrible season. There is a difference between fun romps with good acting, intriguing characters, and sympathetic situations, and just being straight lectured to.
The fact that she didn't prepare for the role really shows. And I hope Chibnall is forced to learn some humility after that. The disrespect he showed to the fanbase should be a cautionary tale taught at all major studios for years to come.
Re:Good Riddance... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually a lot of what was labelled as "woke" as just idiots not knowing their history. Like black Roman soldiers in the UK a couple of thousand years ago. They were really there, the Roman Empire recruited from Africa and sent them to the furthest northern reaches of their territory.
But some people didn't know that and didn't bother check, and labelled it "woke rewriting of history" (or I think it was SJW back then, but same thing).
Re: Good Riddance... (Score:2)
Nothing whatsoever to do with that, but dont worry, you'll manage to come up with a half decent straw man one day.
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In order for an argument to be a strawman it needs to distract from the primary point. As you have not provided any examples from which to distract from the example presented isn't a strawman.
Sorry, but that's what happens when your post is devoid of content, so maybe when you label the BBC in some way it would serve you best to provide examples. Incidentally there was a logical fallacy here, but it wasn't the parent's Strawman but rather your Appeal to Authority.
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I suggest you go look up what appeal to authority means. I know you think it makes you sound intellgent by writing it but unfortunately the opposite is true since you clearly don't have a clue what it means. As for example storylines - the whole raj guilt trip one would be a good start. Though I doubt you've ever actually actually watched the program either, you're just another virtue signaller collecting brownie points from the other groupthinkers.
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Feel free to post where I appealed to authority, I need a good laugh.
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the Roman Empire recruited from Africa and sent them to the furthest northern reaches of their territory.
North Africans aren't the same as sub-Saharan Africans. Phoenicians colonized North Africa. They'd be more like Syrians/Lebanese than anything else.
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Re: Good Riddance... (Score:2)
Sure, North Africans. Bear in mind these were typically of a more Mediterranean appearance than Sub-Saharan. Neither Rome nor Carthage ventured very far south, preferring the north coast.
There's a pretty clear reason for this unusual spectacle of an apparently black Roman. The same reason the BBC found a black Celt and a black blacksmith in iron age Britain. If there is a 0.1% example of a black personality then they use that to justify jamming one in.
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Anyone who uses "woke" unironically is a person who can be ignored.
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Perhaps there were black soldiers in the legions, but how common were they? How common and acceptable was homosexuality among them?
Absent some reasonably established belief that it was likely there would be black Roman soldiers on Britannia, their inclusion in the show is going to come off as just woke bullshit. And let's not pretend that
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No need to wonder, just check the historical records. Written accounts of that period talk about soldiers with very dark skin, much darker than the people living in southern Italy and on the north coast of Africa.
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Granted, unlike the casting of Watson in Netflix's The Irregulars, it is at least historically possible for a black soldier to have been in the Roman legion occupying Britannia. But if the character was written that way for reasons other than producing a good e
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Having watched ALL Doctor Who available and maybe a few lost ones... Some as a child and most as an adult. The old series had some pretty unusual material for a children's programming. It was full of dialog, politics, pacing without much action especially compared to cartoons and everything I saw children watching since the 90s makes it all appear slow and boring as attention spans shrink and imagination disappeared. I can't imagine most children watching the old series. The new Who was targeted at moder
The problem I have with today's Who (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who's been watching since the 70s. Here's the problem I have with Doctor who in its current form:
In the 1970s they had terrible special effects. So they had to spend a lot of extra time on dialog and character building and science.
Today, the show is 90% special effects, almost no backstory, and the doctor rather than being an intelligent scientist, she's a magical wizard with a magic wand (sonic screwdriver). The Daleks can are basically invincible, can fly, time travel, etc. They turned a science show into Harry Potter.
I think it runs deeper than that (Score:5, Insightful)
Comedians have the same problem because vaudeville went away and because of cell phones recording their shows. We all love the Groucho Marx movies but a lot of those bits were honed and perfected in live shows. There's a lot fewer live shows and worse if you're trying out new material and it bombs is a good chance somebody's recording it with a cell phone and will post it to YouTube. So when you have a bad night the whole country knows it.
That's kind of what's happening here. It's like a video game without beta testers.
Re:The problem I have with today's Who (Score:4, Insightful)
New Who had some moments, some good ideas. The problem is the showrunners.
First there was Davis, who started out okay but seemed to run out of complete ideas quickly. Eventually everything was just a McGuffin and a big tease that turned out to be BS. There were some decent episodes, mostly written by Moffat... So they made Moffat showrunner.
Moffat's problem is that when he was no longer constrained by having to wrap a story up in one episode he just stopped wrapping things up. Every big plot point that seemed to be building to something was never resolved, it just lead on to something else and was forgotten about. The writing was very poor by that point too, and Moffat did nothing to stop the decline.
Finally we had Chibnall who made a decent attempt at getting Who back on track. It still had a lot of problems but with more of an ensemble cast at least there were more opportunities to do something a bit different than "monster of the week gets defeated by Doctor's McGuffin" again. Whittaker is a decent doctor, a bit more emotionally mature now having seen first hand what human friendship and family is about, but still kinda nuts.
Their series have had lower budgets so less effects, which has actually helped because they had to come up with more interesting plots instead of relying on special effects.
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Russell T Davies was such a Who fanboy that he made a great writer - since he knows Who canon from the very beginning - and the perfect show runner, because he had such a love for it he would be in a position to protect it.
Moffatt seemed to write well under supervision. He didn't have what it takes to be the show runner. This is how we got Chibnall.
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The thing is, Moffatt was such a Who fanboy that it made him a worse writer. He was so in love with The Doctor that The Doctor went from being a time-travelling misfit having adventures to being an immortal god literally responsible for the existence of the Universe. It just got silly.
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It's like very series now. Look at Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. Are there anything that is still good like the originals? :(
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Same thing happened with games. When all companies were forced to make games in 320x200 pixels in 16 or 256 colours, with maybe Tandy 3-voices or Ad Lib OPL2 music on a 16MHz computer with only 640KB, the games had to be fun or interesting otherwise nobody would have bought and played them.
Today, we have extremely powerful consoles and gaming computers powered with things like multi-gigahertz processors with 8 gigabytes of RAM or more, insanely powerful GPUs like the RTX 3000 series, but all games are basic
JMS (Score:4, Interesting)
How about considering someone from outside the UK?
Michael Straczynski - he's expressed interest.
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I don't really know if now is a good moment for this. You know how his scripts are, 2 years of utter confusion before you finally start to realize what the hell is going on. Yes, in the end it is awesome, but remember how you sat there puzzled the first 2 seasons of B5 going "wtf am I watching here?"
Re:JMS (Score:4, Insightful)
Straczynski would be great, he likes to come up with the whole plot for multiple seasons in advance. One of the things that has really hurt modern Who is the lack of satisfying season long story arcs and proper resolutions to things.
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What about RMS? That would be inclusive.
Showrunners (Score:2)
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I'd vote for Neil Gaiman in two heartbeats.
I don't know. I liked The Doctor's Wife, but I think Gaiman would be too whimsical if given full control. I can only take so much whimsy.
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The Doctor's Wife was pretty good but Nightmare In Silver wasn't.
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I'm down for Gaiman, if someone's holding his leash. He can get a tad..."strange", which works for his normal audience but I worry about his long term impact on a series like Doctor Who.
Bad scripts, bad stories (Score:4, Interesting)
Whittaker may or may not have been a good Doctor with better scripts, but there's not much sign of it.
The scripts were terrible - just stupid, mostly - but that doesn't let her off with anything better than a "maybe", IMO.
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I watched a couple of episodes of Whittaker and then realised that she was acting just like Tennant. Can't hate her acting for that, although Tennant was a better Tennant, but the scripts gave her little to work with. Also, I hate ensemble companions. It didn't work in the past (Adric, anyone?) and it doesn't work now.
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How dare you pick on Adric! He was my favourite companion.
PS: My favourite character from ST:NG was Wesley.
Write for your audience (Score:3)
My hope for Hollywood is gone, but maybe, just maybe, there's hope at least for TV.
I know, I know, you want to appeal to a broader audience and get more people to watch your show. And your train of thought is "Hey, if we retool the show to appeal to that demographic over there, they will watch it too".
The fallacy in your logic is the "too". Because now you not only have to win over an audience that you don't have yet, something everyone who even spent a second in marketing knows is incredibly hard to pull off, you're also endagering retaining an audience you already have. Yes, if everything works out, you can end up with more people watching, retaining your existing audience and gaining a new demographic.
What you fail to see, and what happens more often than not, is that the other demographic doesn't give a fuck about your product because they don't expect it to appeal to them, so they don't even look, while you're losing your existing audience with storylines, plots and developments they're not interested in at all.
FUCKING GET A CLUE, DAMMIT!
I don't watch Transformer movies. Why? Because I'm not interested in mindless action movies where character development doesn't even work as a joke anymore because films don't get developed anymore, so the joke about the only development happening in the dark room falls flat. So what will happen if you try to market that movie franchise to me by toning down the action and creating interesting characters, maybe a new autobot even, that go through story arcs where they have to learn and progress to become "better" characters, who will sacrifice their awesome boom-boom firepower for character development? You will alienate the existing crowd of fans that like over the top action and flashy CGI graphics while still not getting me because I simply and plainly don't expect that from a Transformers movie.
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TLDR: Get woke, go broke.
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Not necessarily. If you have a woke audience, you should most definitly write accordingly.
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They won't. The entertainment industry is so insular that they firmly believe they're producing amazing art, and any such criticism must be from those that don't understand it, and thus can be dismissed as irrelevant. Or they believe in their cause to such an extent that any sacrifice is deemed acceptable ( I've met both types ).
The notion that a show can "just be fun and that's ok" is foreign to the lot of them.
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Ok, then I won't criticize it.
But also don't expect me to watch it. I obviously don't get it, so I guess wasting my time on it is futile.
The show needs new writers... (Score:4, Interesting)
... and a break from the navel gazing past.
The scripts Whittaker had to work with, were worse than even Capaldi endured and to her credit, she tried. God, she tried.
But, it was near unwatchable - for me at least. It was just one bit groan-fest.
Doctor Who has always had a theatrical bent, where the action would "pause" for dialogue - that was one of the endearing aspects of the show. ... unless the script sucks.
The Doctor would launch into a minutes worth of dialogue at the most critical point - just as the baddies were on the verge of succeeding, berate them with a "do you know who I am?" and then defeat them - the world/planet/people saved - hoorah!
All good theatrical stuff...
The show wasn't helped by the fairly wooden acting by the Doctors companions - likely suffering more than Jodie for lack of decent scripting.
For this show to survive, the old guard of writers need to be ... shunted. Given the boot. The navel gazing has to end. The ridiculous plot lines and so many many nods to the past, need to end.
The show has got itself into so many twists, due to trying to keep a time line of past events somehow relevant.
This got really bad in Matt Smith's tenure, but the scripts were good enough, for the most part, to hold it together.
There's SO much possibility with a time lord, an infinite variety of stories - but perhaps it is time to let go of the baggage.
Right now, Marvel are just killing it in the sci-fi genre, totally smacking the ball out of the park.
Loki reminded me SO much of the way Doctor Who, in its finer episodes, spun a story.
It had that theatrical bent, cheesy but funny dialogue, slightly low-fi special effects, moments of monologues and just the feeling you were watching a theatre production.
That's what always made Doctor Who shine - and I'm pretty sure the directors, producers and writers of Loki were having a little nod toward Doctor Who.
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I thought they completely wasted Capaldi. He seemed like he had the ability to do a great job with the role, but the scripts were just awful, over and over again. I gave up on Doctor Who somewhere around Capaldi moping around the dark ages, playing electric guitar while standing on a battle tank, pretending to be a wizard for a bunch of unwashed numpties.
I remember when Doctor Who wasn't just running and shouting until they figure o
Too much angst (Score:3)
While the special effects, nods to the earlier incarnation, and an occasional good story have been enjoyable there's an increasing angst in the doctors that've made the reboot increasingly hard to watch. The original wit and humor one might expect from a timelord who's seen it all frequently turns into unappealing existential drama.
Ms. Whittaker is disappointing as the first female doctor and the least interesting female timelord the series has produced. Instead of the wise adult in the room Mary Tamm [wikipedia.org] that I was hoping for we're left with a nerdy female teenager with more enthusiasm than wit who's barely able to override emotions with intelligence.
Hopefully the next crew can reverse this slide.
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Missy and the Ruth doctor showed what a female timelord could be.
Problem is, they cranked up her zany too high. After Capaldi's crotchety old man shtick, Jodie had to fall back to playing to the youth audience - it worked for Matt Smith because he was a kid in his 20s but her doctor just seems high on caffeine every episode.
That and her companions have been just plain wooden. Was I the only one who liked Bill Potts? She had far more spunk and personality than daggy grandad Graham and Ryan. Yaz might be salv
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Graham was the only good thing there.
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Dragged down by his dopey step-grandson and the ghost of his dead wife.
If they're going to cast Afro-English actors, the BBC need to stop with the tokenism.
Mickey Smith gets written out to a parallel universe, Martha Jones lasts only a season before being replaced by Donna. And conveniently those 2 fall in love because reasons. Bill Potts gets turned into a cyberwoman after only 1 series. Ruth is an alternate timeline doctor but lasts only a couple of cameo episodes.
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Wait, you do have a point though - the 'spunky' black lesbian. The following season's excessively large cast of companions were as painfully 1-dimensional as Bill, but far less enthusi
Another regeneration? (Score:2)
This is the first Time Lord killed by falling ratings.
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Um, Colin Baker's short term as the Sixth Doctor? Sylvester McCoy's ending the franchise for *how* many years? Though McCoy's last season was a definite improvement with elements of the 'Cartmel Masterplan' coming into play, Come to think of it, the whole Timeless Child plotline rings back to the idea of the Doctor as "The Other" from said backstory.
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The 'Cartmel Masterplan' was the biggest piece of bullshit. That turned Doctor Who into god. It was giant fuck fest that turned a traveler into some kind of supreme being with a master plan. For fucks sake.
Doctor Who is just some guy with a box that travels in time. Good grief, leave it alone.
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worst season (Score:2)
What the fsck is a "showrunner"? (Score:2)
I compared the Dr Who of about a decade ago to Torchwood, and gave up on the Doctor.
Did America ever get Torchwood, or was it a bit too much for them?
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I'm pretty sure Torchwood aired on some channel here in the US, though I mostly had to download it at the time. By "a bit too muc
Whittaker is great in my book (Score:2)
I know not to come to Slashdot to read any kind words about any show or movie that I enjoy, but I'm here to say at least one more positive thing about Doctor Who and Whittaker. Despite having some annoying political elements pop up recently, I thought the newest Doctor to be very likeable. And all of her companion actors were also endearing and many times had their moments. It's too bad they got so political and let that cloud people's perceptions. Stick to solid stories, good character development, and fun
serial killers (Score:2)
It seems to be a trend.
After idiot showrunners ruined Game of Thrones, different idiots ruined Doctor Who.
In both cases, what's needed is that they declare the last season a terrible mistake, apologize to all the fans, hang the people responsible from a tall tree, and redo it all, retconning that terrible season out of existence.
I don't know what's going on there, but within a short timespan, I've lost all my favorite TV shows (Big Bang Theory at least had a fairly good finale).
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Yeah, black or gay man seems the best bet for the next Doctor if they don't double-down and go for a black woman.
A white and apparently straight male lead would be abhorrent to these people, not least if all because better ratings would be seen as a victory for the literal 1940s German socialists.
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The bigger question will be how or even if they try to drag themselves out of the nasty plot hole they have thrown themselves into
It turns out, when Whittaker's doctor fell out of the Tardis, she actually hit her head and has been in a coma for the last two seasons. It was all just her fever nightmares as she was regenerating.
I believe that is how her first episode started out, but to be fair, it has been a bit of time, and I haven't been watching since the end of her first season.