Doctor Who is living a bit of a half-life at the moment, as BBC producers and executives do their utmost to say, without committing to anything concrete, that the series has a future after its highly controversial season finale earlier this year. It’s just going to take quite a long time to actually hear anything concrete, so in the meantime we’ve now resorted to… producers calling people mean for wondering if the show has a future.
The lastest drama comes from an interview with series executive producer Jane Tranter, who described Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman as “rude†for comments he made in a recent interview with Doctor Who Magazine about his own personal relationship to the show. Shearman is a prolific writer of Doctor Who audio dramas and novels, but is best known to the modern era of the show for being the writer that brought back the Daleks in 2005’s seminal episode “Dalekâ€.
“I go through phases; I have a real push/pull thing with the show,†Shearman said in an interview for Doctor Who Magazine 622, published last week, to mark the 20th anniversary of the episode (via Den of Geek). “At the moment, I’m in a ‘pull’ phase. It’s weird because the show is probably as dead as we’ve ever known it.â€
“‘As dead as we’ve ever known.’ That’s really rude, actually. And really untrue,†Tranter pushed back in a new interview with BBC Wales today to mark the anniversary of Doctor Who‘s current production company, Bad Wolf Studios (via Deadline). “The plans for Doctor Who are really simply this: the BBC and BBC Studios had a partnership with Disney+ for 26 episodes. We are currently 21 episodes down into that 26-episode run. We have got another five episodes of [spin-off series] The War Between The Land And The Sea to come. At some point after that, decisions will be made together with all of us about what the future of Doctor Who entails.â€
“It’s a 60-year-old franchise. It’s been going for 20 years nonstop since we brought it back in 2005,†Tranter continued. “You would expect it to change, wouldn’t you? Nothing continues the same always, or it shouldn’t continue the same always. So it will change in some form or another. But the one thing we can all be really clear of is that the Doctor will be back and everyone, including me, including all of us, just has to wait patiently to see when—and who.â€
It doesn’t really help that, as Tranter notes, Doctor Who fans have been used to the series as a consistent staple over the last 20 years—although there have been extended breaks between seasons at times, the direct continuation of the show has never really been publicly in doubt since 2005. Even in years when more time was needed for new seasons or transitions between eras, Doctor Who maintained a presence on TV through special one-off episodes. This current gap, where nothing is guaranteed beyond five episodes of a spinoff series that is distinctly not the main TV show, is unprecedented for the modern era of the show, so simply telling people to wait and see if the show will even acknowledge its absurd climax, which saw Ncuti Gatwa regenerate into former series star Billie Piper.
But it also doesn’t help that Tranter was only provided part of Shearman’s commentary to respond to—commentary that explains his feelings while also touching on what Tranter herself acknowledged as an air of uncertainty about who the show could even star whenever it returns.
“After 1989, we had, for years, a current Doctor. Now, everything that is ever going to be produced in Doctor Who terms is going to feel retrogressive,†Shearman went on to explain. “At least with the New Adventures and then the BBC Books, you thought, ‘It’s the current Doctor—McCoy or McGann.’ No one’s going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means. In a funny way, the closing moments of ‘The Reality War’ seem to put a full stop on things. We didn’t have that before.â€
And in that regard, Shearman is absolutely right: the BBC’s desire to play coy about what exactly, if anything, Piper’s regeneration actually means, means that Doctor Who currently exists in a status quo it never had, even when it was first cancelled: a nebulous future where all anyone knows is that the most recent Doctor is dead, and the status of their next incarnation is unknown. It’s all well and good saying that the show will be back at some unknown point in the future, but you then can’t really bristle when people also point out that that doesn’t actually mean there’s a future for the show yet.
Time will tell just how long we will have to go until we get some definitive answers from the BBC, Disney, or whoever a new partner for Doctor Who might be. But it’s perhaps more likely we’re going to be watching people involved with the series going slowly insane over not being able to provide those answers for a good while yet than it is us watching a Billie Piper Doctor Who movie any time soon.
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Original Source: https://gizmodo.com/doctor-who-jane-tranter-rob-shearman-rude-bbc-disney-2000673593
Original Source: https://gizmodo.com/doctor-who-jane-tranter-rob-shearman-rude-bbc-disney-2000673593
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