To say fans in the Doctor Who community are taking the uncertainty of the show’s future badly is a bit of an understatement. Since its return in 2005, fans have withstood changing cast, production teams, and even streaming partners with the knowledge of a clear path forward. This is not the case at the moment. At the climax of the second season of the show on Disney+, lead actor Ncuti Gatwa regenerated without warning and turned into Billie Piper with no explanation. Fans (me) were confused. This prompted a former writer of the series to say Doctor Who is “as dead as we’ve ever known it.” Series producer Jane Tranter was not pleased about this.
The full quote from writer Rob Shearman (“Dalek” from 2005, plus a number of spinoff works) came from Doctor Who Magazine. (h/t Den of Geek) “I go through phases; I have a real push/pull thing with the show,” he said. “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.” He says that Gatwa’s abrupt departure and the appearance of Piper with now further announcement had “put a full stop on things.”
I think that’s a fairly reasonable thing to assert, especially since the show really is in limbo until after the five-episode spinoff The War Between the Land and the Sea airs on Disney+ at some undisclosed time in 2026. But producer Jane Tranter, the former BBC exec who brought the show back in 2005 and who returned along with Russell T Davies, et al, for the Disney seasons, has taken exception to this.
“‘As dead as we’ve ever known.’ That’s really rude, actually. And really untrue,” Tranter said during an interview with BBC Radio Wales on Friday (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 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.”
No offense to Ms. Tranter, but this doesn’t really assuage any fears. We don’t have a release date for The War, only that originally it would air in November of this year and Disney bumped it to next year some time. So we have to wait until that airs and then “at some point after that,” the various parties—BBC, Disney, and Tranter’s Bad Wolf Studios—will make decisions. The momentum of the series, whatever that might have been, is certainly not chugging along. No one is making anything because they can’t. Russell T Davies himself even said he doesn’t know if the show will come back.
So, obviously Doctor Who is a valuable brand for the BBC. I don’t think the series will be gone for good or anything. But “as dead as we’ve ever known it” feels like a pretty apt term for where we are after 20 years of near-continuous production.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
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