Doctor Whois the longest-running and likely most successful television franchise in history, and its constantly changing team has pushed it infinite new directions. The rebooted series has had three showrunners, and after a decade, the first of three is returning to take over the show once more.
It’s hard to imagine a franchisemore controversial thanDoctor Who. There are fans that will argue for a hundred different shark-jumping moments that permanently ruined the show, yet it marches on to no apparent end. Thirteen lead actors overall, thirteen full seasons since the reboot, and a fan base that remains huge and devoted.
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In 1989,Doctor Whowas canceled due to a combination of long-running production issues and gradually declining viewership. Seven years later, in 1996, BBC along with Fox made an attempt to regenerate The Doctor. That film didn’t relaunch the franchise and immediately faded from memory for most. The TV movie was one of several attempts to getDoctor Whoback into the consistent rotation, but it was the only one to actually hit the screen. Three years later, BBC aired a charity special calledDoctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death.Those two brief appearances were the only moments of the franchise for the sixteen-year gap after the show’s cancellation. Finally, in 2005, someone stepped up to createa reboot that would stick.
Russell T Davies has been alifelong fan ofDoctor Who, and his very first screenwriting effort was a spec script he submitted to the series in 1987. It was rejected by the show’s editor, but after Davies took over, he reworked the episode and aired it himself. He began pitching a reboot in 1998, then was handed the reins in 2003. He excised large portions of the canon, keeping only bare necessities. He learned from American TV shows likeBuffyandSmallville. He wrote eight of the thirteen episodes of his first season. Four days after the premiereof Davies' first episode, he was approved for a second season and a Christmas special.
Like every decision made onDoctor Who, Davies' reboot was controversial, but it is the period that most fans today recall as the beginning of their relationship to the franchise. Russell T Davies ran the show from 2005 to 2009, presiding over four of the best received seasons in television history. His chosen successor was a writer who had crafted excellent episodes likeBlinkandThe Empty Child, Steven Moffat.
Moffat’s run onDoctor Whohas introduced some massive fan-favorite elements. It was he that wroteThe Curse of Fatal Death, and subsequently became the first writer to make The Doctor a woman. Moffatcreated the Weeping Angels, the Silence, River Song, and brought a tremendous amount of meta-textual commentary to the text. His work on the show was award-winning and hugely popular, but it deviated from Davies' in a number of ways. Most importantly, Moffat spent a ton of time on overarching storylines. Standalone episodes are hugely important toDoctor Who, but Moffat regularly tied each new adventure back towards a larger narrative. This had the effect of making the franchise less episodic, serializing the plot somewhat. Sometimes this was accomplished through brief scenes at the end, sometimes random elements would be brought back across seasons to tie up loose ends. Moffat ended his tenure withDoctor Whowith the 2017 Christmas special, handing over the reins to yet another new face.
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Chris Chibnall took overDoctor Whoalong with the newest lead actor, Jodie Whittaker. As has become tradition, Chibnall wrote the final moments ofthe aforementioned Christmas specialso that he could have his hand on Whittaker’s first and last words as the Doctor. No stranger to the series, Chibnall wrote the 2007 episode “42,” along with four other episodes throughout 2010 and 2012. Chibnall is best known as the creator of the excellent and well-received detective seriesBroadchurch, but he was also the lead writer of the spin-off seriesTorchwood. Chibnall’s run, like every other one, was intensely controversial. Continuing the trend, he added even more old series lore and callbacks. While criticsand some fans loved Whittaker’sDoctor, there has been much sparser praise for Chibnall’s storytelling, pacing, and huge retcons to the lore.
For better or worse, Russell T Davies' run onDoctor Whowas dramatically different from those who followed him. His return could fix some fan’s problems with the show by returning to basics. Davies' Doctor wasn’t the main character of the franchise; rather, he was the fun-loving, eccentric, adventurer that all the grounded human characters could react to. The Doctor solves problems, but he also causes them. He has his own inscrutable whims and gets swept away on weird tangents, and it’s these aspects that fans love about the titular Time Lord.
One of the most frequent complaints levied at Chibnall was the waythat he sidelined companions. Moffat’s storyline was all about The Doctor’s layers of hidden depth that were constantly teased, but rarely explored. Davies can bring an appropriate sense of focus back toDoctor Who, along with a return to manageable series lore, and more fun standalone adventures. Davies' turn on the series remains the least controversial, so fans will likely be thrilled to see what he can bring to the table upon his return.
