Amid all the doom and gloom and confusion and other tabloid nonsense and depressing realities of modern TV...
Let's say nothing goes wrong, some wonderful company gets the tender, and the new Doctor is announced.
Who is your dream Doctor? Let's not hold back. Who would be brilliant? And why?
Let's just have some fun with this one, eh?
People are still harping on that Doctor Who is "cancelled". Well, it's not. As Richard Osman explained in The Rest is Entertainment, using his own knowledge of the industry and information from talking to those in the industry, what's happening right now is the exact opposite of cancellation.
You can read a transcript of the relevant sections here, but the headlines are as follows...
> In 2025, Disney pull out. The BBC are still absolutely saying “No, we are definitely going to carry on with Doctor Who. What we will do is to put it out to tender” – again, I'll explain what that means – “in 2028 to 2029.” That was the original idea. At which point everyone goes, “Oh, we should do a Christmas special to bridge the gap because that's that's a long time.”
So, prior to the announcement that's got everyone running scared, the plan was for a Christmas special at the end of this year – and then absolutely nothing until 2028/29, at which point a tender process would start, and maybe a year or two after that we might see new episodes...
So the plan in 2025 was for 2026 to have a special, then nothing till somewhere around 2030/31.
You could say the plan in 2025 was for another, shorter "Wilderness Years". The plan was to "rest" the show, in a situation that bears some resemblance to 1989, if you squint a bit.
But, here's the thing, there's been – as Osman put it – a huge "churn" at the top of the BBC. Lots of people including the Director General and the Chief Content Officer changed over. So what happened next?
> As soon as [incoming Chief Content Officer] Kate Phillips properly gets her feet under the table, she said, “Oh, we're going to put it out to tender now.” [...] [This] is saying [Doctor Who] is a big deal for us. We want to give it multiple series. We need to find production companies to pitch into us to say they want to make Doctor Who. > > As soon as they said we're putting out for tender now, you can't make the Christmas special. [...] There are companies now who are working on where they [will] take the Doctor Who universe, and if you're about to drop an enormous Christmas-shaped bomb in the middle of that, it makes it makes that process impossible for everybody. So that that's why.
And in case you're still worried:
> The BBC tender quite a lot of things, and I'll say this: there is not a single show they have tendered which hasn't gone on to have multiple series afterwards. They've never done a tender and gone “Actually, we're going to get rid of this” or done a tender and they do one more series and it disappears. Every tender the BBC has ever done is for a show that they are absolutely committed to, and they want to go forward with. So, it's not the long grass. Even though people think it is at the moment, it's not.
So, this post is here to say: Rejoice!
Stop listening to the clickbait, the disinformation, the tabloids, the crap. Doctor Who has not been cancelled. It is the opposite of cancellation. The plan was to "rest" it, but the new brass has said no – we're making it happen.
The tender process tends to take about six months – so by the beginning of next year we'll probably know exactly what Doctor Who's future is.
Meanwhile, Christmas '26, the cancelled episode – it was commissioned on the basis that we wouldn't know what Doctor Who's future is until at least 2028/29.
We've lost an episode, and with it we've rendered that cliffhanger at the end of The Reality War a silly artefact of something that looked like it was going to happen, and ultimately didn't – but that's okay. It'll look stupid in the short term, but what's going on here is about the long term.
Welcome to the Anti-Wilderness, in which – rather than languish in a void of impossibility and rumours and whispers like the Wilderness Years – Doctor Who is going to flourish with new activity as a new production company is eventually chosen, and as they spin up their joyous new version of our favourite show, with a new creative team behind it. All because (again, in an inversion of the Wilderness) the BBC is very specifically and strongly committed to guaranteeing the show's long-term future.
Doctor Who will live. The previous version of the show is dead, because Bad Wolf is not making the show anymore. Russell T Davies and his production team are out, because a new production company is going to take it on. (Probably BBC Studios – they always get these BBC tenders, and they'll probably do a great job if they get it.)
As I said in my big essay the other day, Doctor Who is Dead, Long Live Doctor Who. I think a lot of people missed that what I meant there was this:
Doctor Who (2023–2025) is dead.
Long Live Doctor Who (1963–present)
And also Long Live Doctor Who (???–???; probably something like 2029–2034, followed by another new Doctor Who 2035–2040, followed by another, and another, and another...)
I personally am sad because I was enjoying RTD2. I wanted to see more episodes like Wild Blue Yonder, and Dot And Bubble, and Lux. But, just like we lost Sylvester McCoy's planned fourth season and ultimately got Chris Eccleston's first – or like we lost Season 23 (early 1986) and instead got Season 23 (Trial of a Time Lord), or Moffat's theoretical Series 8 with Matt Smith, in favour of Series 8 with Peter Capaldi...
I'm excited to see whatever comes next, and you should be too.
Christmas is cancelled, Russell is gone, Bad Wolf is gone, there's no Doctor, the most recent incarnation of the show is dead, and its future is entirely up to whatever company bids for it next.
Is this the end?
Russell T Davies returning to Doctor Who in 2023 struck many people as an act of desperation. A show that was floundering, crawling back to its saviour and arguably its most successful previous showrunner to be rescued again.
As loudly as certain fans complained about the move, it was logically quite sound – the show was moving to a co-production model with an American streamer in the wake of the BBC's ever-falling budget making it impossible to produce the show. Chibnall's version of the show failed to grab back the audience that fell off during Moffat's version. Russell was a safe pair of hands, and rather a coup for the show's appeal to the American broadcaster.
Of course, under his reign, Russell has proven about as popular as any showrunner of Doctor Who tends to be. The loudest voices are the most negative, but they've had a point all along.
David Tennant coming back was transparently a plea for nostalgia. You can argue it's justified as a way to grab for the audience that's slowly but steadily fallen off since 2008, and all three specials were critical and audience hits, but the cynics were right: Russell comes back, he brings David and Catherine with him, there's even time for Wilf, we're doing Christmas specials again.
"RTD2" began as a transparent plea for nostalgia. A blatant grab for the old fans to come back.
The cynics are right – but the result was 7.5 million viewers for The Star Beast, 7.1 for Wild Blue Yonder, 6.8 for The Giggle, and 7.3 for The Church on Ruby Road.
The cynics were right – but while The Star Beast was transparently a Doctor Who episode straight out of 2008, the rest of the 2023 specials were a push into new territory. Wild Blue Yonder was a quiet, two-handed horror, and The Giggle and The Church on Ruby Road were the beginning of the new direction for the show – gods and goblins and magic.
The cynics are right – Space Babies was a terrible opener for Series 14, and Empire of Death was a mess from top to bottom.
The cynics were right – but name any other episode from Series 14 that was broadly unpopular.
The cynics are right – The Reality War was a terrible finale.
The cynics were right – but name any other episode from Series 15 that was broadly unpopular.
The cynics were right - but name any episode from Series 14 or 15 that relied on nostalgia, aside from Sutekh and the Rani.
So why did this version of the show die?
The plan was for Disney to fill the funding gap for the show. Promises were made at a time when they were investing hard into streaming, promises were made by American corporate heads in Hollywood, the land of broken promises.
Everyone at Bad Wolf and the BBC took it on good faith that the Disney promises would be fulfilled – and they weren't.
Disney was losing money hand over fist on Disney+. There was a change of regime, and the new regime's directive was to cut off as much Disney+ spending as possible.
Meanwhile, Doctor Who was spinning up production, deals had been signed for a minimum of 21 episodes with options for extension which were supposed to be taken up as soon as season 1 was on the air... but they were allowed to leave it till season 2... and while the BBC waited, twiddling their thumbs for an answer, the show was in limbo.
Season 3 and 4 were planned out, production was ready to get rolling as soon as they got the go-ahead, which never arrived, and because of the delay, they lost their leading man, and in amongst the reshoots to allow him an exit, it was becoming clear Disney would not be fulfilling their promise.
With Disney out, the BBC had no real contingency plan.
Russell T Davies agreed to write a Christmas special this year – it's virtually certain he pitched something verbally, certainly all the noises being made by various people indicate him having something down... but back when there were fake GenAI-driven leaks from the set around the new year, Russell was shooting it down on the basis that he hadn't even started writing a script.
And he never would write that script, as we found out today – because the Christmas episode was commissioned at a time when it looked like there was no future at all. And now there is a plan.
That plan is to basically sell the show to someone else to do.
So long, Russell T Davies. So long, Phil Collinson. So long, Jane Tranter. So long, Julie Gardner.
What was once an essential part of the pitch to a foreign streaming partner is now an old version of the show, which is to be ritually sacrificed to give life to whatever comes next.
What was once a nostalgic tease to drum up buzz and headlines in the face of a terribly uncertain future is now a "How the hell do we explain Billie Piper?" for the next lot to either answer or move straight past.
(Although let's be honest, that question won't be hard to answer – just do what they did with Paul McGann and cut straight to your new Doctor already on adventures and maybe deal with it some other time in retrospect. Perhaps in a crazy fanservice-heavy special episode.)
The cynics are right that this most recent era of Doctor Who has had bad episodes. Mind you, 3 out of 21 is about on par with any other era that wasn't run by Eric Saward or Chris Chibnall.
Two of those three bad episodes happened to be finales, and the other was a season opener. That's not great.
But what really killed the show this time round?
It wasn't Russell T Davies, it wasn't Phil Collinson, wasn't Jane Tranter, wasn't Julie Gardner. It was Disney, it was the lack of BBC funding, it was the changing landscape of TV (and the unsteady ground of streaming), and of course it was also the global economic downturn...
What killed this version of the show was circumstances, money, and all the other boring things.
Because creatively – this era stands up just as well as any other. Here on /r/gallifrey, Steven Moffat is held up as the gold standard – well, he did write Heaven Sent... he also wrote The Wedding of River Song. Under his tenure we got Vincent and the Doctor... and we also got Closing Time. We had the immensely cool season arc of Missy's imprisonment and development as a person... and we also got the utter mess of series 6.
What I'm saying is – let's not jump to piling on hate regarding an era of Doctor Who that tried some new things, brought back some old things, and kept the torch burning for another few years.
The cynics are right – we got some bad episodes in this era.
The cynics were right – but we also had some all-timers. I know Wild Blue Yonder, Lux, and The Well will be placing well in my personal list of favourites.
RTD2 is dead. Long live RTD2.
Doctor Who is dead, for the... erm... well... Let's call it the nine hundredth time. That's nice and even.
The BBC is going to shop the show out to some other producer to make. It's going to be different. The cynics will hate it as they always do – it will have too much of the old and too much of the new and not enough of the old and not enough of the new.
It will probably have a lower budget than it did under Disney, and given how everyone does streaming TV these days, it will probably only run six episodes per season, with heavier serialisation than we're used to since the 2005 revival.
But, while the show is dead for the time being, unlike when money and circumstances killed it in 1989, the BBC desperately wants it on, desperately wants it to succeed, and while there are just as many creative problems to surmount as ever (trying to make a show this ambitious on TV money has never been easy), our favourite show will be back.
Until then there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs – and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine!