doctor who didn’t need the disney money IMO as Shauny said it looked good in Jodie’s era!! it even looked good in Capaldi’s era!! its funny I was so hyped for RTD returning due to the fact since he left he’s wrote Its a Sin and Years and Years which were incredible but S1… so many issues with it for me personally and again a LOT stems from the midnight release. The return of Pete McTighe has me concerned, as does RTD’s retconning of Big FInish / dig at them he made in an article a while back. Which is wild considering he worked with them before returning, post-RTD1. I’m not looking forward to the spin off cause its been done at big finish and its mctighe who annoys me so much. RTD is without question a great marketer for the show, unlike Chibnall, but at least Chibnall dared to try something different.
Truthfully the midnight release may have a huge impact on my enjoyment tbh, and it sucks massively.
Can you explain why? Is it just because there’s a compulsion to watch it as soon as it drops?
What was the dig? RTD has always been a huge supporter of Big Finish (to the point where it was he who protected them from the BBC when the show returned in 2005 and the BBC were looking to bring all the licences back in house).
Some dartboard thing I think it was, don’t recall. I feel this era has retconned several things too that could’ve had one line to explain them away.
Yeah pretty much, have watched nearly every episode live since I was a kid when series 1 dropped and I really don’t like how its been catered to America with this new timeslot and hope it goes back to normal. The 60th/Christmas Eps worked fine AFAIK with America? So why did it need changing?
The thing is, actors don’t want shorter seasons. It’s part of what the strikes a while back were about; shorter seasons mean less work, means actors are unemployed for most of the year. They want weekends, not six months off.
Somewhere in another thread, I think, @TARDIS32 has debunked the ‘catering for America’ criticism of the time slot.
But really, you can still watch it live because it is still terrestrially broadcast on BBC1 at a set time which is excatly (more or less) when my family watched them.
I’d love to see the actual quote if you can remember where it was from because actual criticism rather than light-hearted banter seems a little out of character for RTD (at least in terms of his feelings about BF). And let’s be honest, they have been very guilty of the dartboard approach - across lots of their ranges - which hasn’t necessarily resulted in their best output recently.
And I hold no stall in criticisms of ‘retconning’ BF stuff. The TV series has been retconning itself since The Dalek Invasion of Earth and the TV show should never ever ever be beholden to what has been in books or audios. And no, I don’t think they even need a line to explain it either. The TV series needs to work for everyone and the fans can work out the inconsistencies themselves just as they’ve been doing since the TV series gave us three differerent versions of what happened to Atlantis.
This has been said here and elsewhere loads of times but…
UK Midnight release aren’t catering for America.
That isn’t primetime for America.
It’s standard for lots of streaming services, ie. Netflix, etc.
It actually makes it easier for lots of people in the UK who can’t watch Saturday night.
Flexibility is good.
You can still wait until 7pm or whatever and watch it live on BBC One.
The TV landscape is changing and this probably would have happened already without Disney.
There’s lots of other stuff on BBC iPlayer that gets released straight away there and then the TV broadcast is later. For Example, The Traitors, the second episode was released straight after the first on iPlayer, but to watch on BBC One you had to wait a day.
It’s just what they do now, and has nothing really to do with RTD and especially not Disney, Disney had zero say about when BBC released it.
Yeah, the issue they would face without Disney money is that casual audiences who have no idea of the behind the scenes stuff would be comparing Doctor Who to the MCU and Star Wars. If it looks significantly cheaper than those two franchises, then audiences will just see it as cheap and lose interest.
I don’t think we will enter another Wilderness Years. Maybe a short hiatus if Disney drop out of the streaming rights, but I think it would only be for two years, and then it would come back under the Sherlock model of three 90 minute episodes a year. Maybe even with Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis as executive producers.
I get that its not primetime as such but its definitely a more convenient time than in the UK. The thing with the Traitors though its not as if its released at a really inconvenient time. I love routine, and I love teatime Doctor Who, it really just doesnt feel the same watching it at 1am-2am and going to bed immediately instead of going on forums for hours on end and watching videos and tweeting about it. I could watch it at another time, but that isn’t an option for me I just have to watch it live and that’s me. I get not everyone will be the same or hold the same opinion and that’s fine, but to me it really ruins my enjoyment.
I just am very protective of Big Finish tbh so criticisms, besides those such as transphobic writers, performers etc) irk me but thats just me, BF is one of my special interests. With that, I have a very fixed view of canon and it does annoy me hugely, when it can easily be worked into the show with a throwaway line. I remember being annoyed WEAT had retconned Spare Parts, only to it be explained as still working in TDF which is great, I miss Moffat for that. I always tend to bring up Night of the Doctor as well, if those companions aint canon then New Who aint 
But in all seriousness I get what you mean and you’re right at the end of the day, but personally it’s something that bothers me while I get it wont bother everyone.
I also think Disney completely missed a trick by not getting the streaming rights for all of Doctor Who on their platform around the world, instead of just the new series.
As it is, on its own, and the weird naming of “Special 1” “Special 2” etc (what is up with that?), it just looks so weird. They could have gotten a new generation of fans interested if they had it all.
My niece and nephew started watching (yes I basically forced them at first haha) and they like the new series but they actually like the Tenth Doctor best (score!) and the only reason they got into that was because it was all on iPlayer.
oh its appallingly laid out on Disney+ if you are unfamiliar. I noticed though the other week, TCORR has now been added into S1 as the first episode. I did see some reactors bill it (IMO incorrectly) as the first episode, so the numbering is all wrong. But thats mostly at Disney’s fault.
But you’re not really watching it ‘iive’. You’re just watching it when it drops. That’s not the same thing.
It’s really important to remember that there never was a canon, isn’t a canon now and never will be a canon in Doctor Who. If the TV series has retconned itself, it’s not going to have a special case for a bunch of audio only a minority of viewers are even aware of, let alone listened to. I get about being protective. I adore BF - and I’ve been with them since the beginning. But Doctor Who is a tapestry and sometimes those threads interweave beautifully and sometimes they pull against each other. And that’s okay.
Canon in Doctor Who is just a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
I agree. The direction & cinematography was superb. There is this big idea that Doctor Who has to compete with things on Netflix, Disney+ etc but while those shows do have big budget FX they are not always as stylish or visually interesting. Most people probably don’t care but Netflix shows especially all look the same. I don’t know if its done while filming or maybe post-production colour grading but if feels like they have a rule in place. It must look like this etc etc.
I don’t want to see the show have to continue with a significant budget reduction but ultimately its all about the writing so could still work. A big budget doesn’t mean a better show, look at that T Rex in JTTW. Why was it there? Seemed like it was just because they had the money.
I get that the canon is never going to be something official, but to my silly autistic brain it very much is something I care about deeply since I got into Big Finish 10 years ago now when I was 15, I don’t expect everybody to understand that and I can on surface level agree that its not official etc. It’s for the same very reason I find the whole midnight thing a nuissance I just have to watch it live, I just do. I feel less of a fan, I don’t think of others as less of a fan if they dont but I myself do. Again, silly autism brain.
If every story was written to fit the entire canon of the TV show, the audio and the rest of the EU, we could never have new stories because they would always clash with some other story that established something years ago. DW is primarily and originally a TV show, so the TV stories and TV canon take precedence over other media.
Oh I totally get the autism brain thing. It’s probably why I have to watch it in the evening rather than at some random time during the day (not that I’m autistic). We all have our sacred cows and hills will die on when it comes to Doctor Who. Just try not to let it spoil your enjoyment of the show - that’s the important thing (especially as what you don’t like is unlikely to change).