Steven Moffat reveals the one thing he’d do differently if he was in charge of Doctor Who again

I think he got tired of fans complaining about the direction of the show, and being so visible and accessible to the media. Moffat seems like he enjoys more of being secluded and just able to write.

Here's the link: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2...ntly-if-he-was-in-charge-of-doctor-who-again/

 

Frankly, I don't blame him one damn bit. Fans have been vicious about him and to him (he quit Twitter and stopped visiting GallifreyBase for that very reason), worse than what Davies experienced and he was regularly roasted, too. Unfortunately, as much as I hate it and despite how much I wish this wasn't the case, the vitoriol comes with the job, especially this job.

Worse, a fair number of fans (including here) already have preexisting hatred for Chris Chibnall, so it's not going to get any better, no matter what he does. Hopefully he takes Moffat's advice and remain in the background as much as he can.

 

Well I'm not too familiar with Chibnall's work in a non-traditional setting apart from his few Doctor Who episodes, and the broadchurch series. My issue with Moffat was always his adamant and smug stance that nothing he did in the series was a mistake. The man thinks way too highly of himself, and any fans who disagreed with his "vision" were idiots. Like it or not, he's brought a lot of the criticism on himself too. In a perfect world in sure we could say "it's all those people." but reality is there are always two sides to every story. Moffat just gets to write his own unopposed by being a celebrity. Fandom consensus or detractors don't matter, when the winner is writing his own history. However, Moffat should remember JNT..

 

For what it's worth, I think Moffat handled the exposure beautifully. For me, his wit is always welcome wherever he wants to display it. My greatest regret in him leaving the show is that we won't get his monthly column in Doctor Who Magazine. And as for the internet hate, that's part of the gig whether you do the interviews or not. It doesn't matter how often the audience sees you so long as they know your name. I don't recall Rick Berman & Brannon Braga doing much press for Star Trek back in the day but that didn't prevent the fans from branding them "the killer Bs." Society has always been a roiling cauldron of irrational opinions. Social media has just made them louder.

 

So what he'd do differently would be to make himself less accessible to criticism? How about just making a better show that wasn't dumbed-down crap?

 

Nope. The "artiste" must be protected from the slings and arrows of the proles.

 

While I think criticism is valid, I think there's a limit to how helpful it can be to a writer in the midst of a creative process, particularly when dealing with such a diverse and vocal fanbase. It also doesn't help that a lot of what the fans are complaining about is something of a moot point by the time they see it because it's long out of Moffat's hands by that point.

That's not to say that I don't believe that he didn't make some course corrections based on fan criticism. I'm sure that, if "Sleep No More" had been more popular, we would have gotten the planned follow-up this season rather than "Empress of Mars." And fans clearly hated Danny Pink and Clara's part-time companion status in Season 8 so much that, while she still remained only a part-time companion in Season 9, we never saw a single shred of her personal life in that season, nor a single mention of her teaching job. (And I would have appreciated some funny offhand remarks about her teaching job every once in awhile, if only for continuity's sake.)

 

Honestly, I've always been under the impression that Moffat isn't really much of a people person. and coming from that perspective the added publicity and limelight he got from being showrunner of both Doctor Who and Sherlock probably was more than he bargained for. Especially since he was the showrunner during the high profile 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and Sherlock took of a lot more than he was expecting it too. I can't really blame him for wanting to be more of a recluse and passing along advice to other writers to be more reclusive.

Bah? We saw her teaching class in The Magician's Apprentice and in The Woman Who Lived Clara talks about one of her students the Doctor helped with her homework, and we even see a selfie on Clara's phone of her and the girl.

 

DW fans complaining about the direction of the show is likely almost as old as the show its self.

 

Sure, but since the dawn of the Internet and especially social media, those voices are amplified tenfold. Every little thing Moffat (and Davies before him) said was dissected over and over. Moffat's point is he should've focused more on the workings of the show and let the stars of the show do more of the press legwork. He understandably feels burnt out by the experience in more ways than one.

 

If the "proles" weren't just hurling shit at him, you might have a point. Internet "criticism" is basically any Moe Eisley Cantina.

 

Agreed..

I think JNT gets a bad wrap sometimes.. Sure he presided over the cancellation, however he did have the BBC director trying to kill it, and admittedly so in later interviews. It was also a budget issue, and hiatus, BBC strikes, and shoddy time schedules. JNT had a lot that was hitting him all at once. I think he Struck Gold quite a few times tho, even in the latter series, with Remembrance of the Daleks.. I still love that epi even today. Moffat on the other hand had everything, and the biggest budgets, and the best PR going. He presided over the worst ratings slide in the show's history since it was rebooted.. I think Moffat Does deserve some Criticism, who doesn't.. no body is perfect. But to act Smug, sarcastic, and condescending when a fan calls him out.. or the media.. yea.. I have no love for Wanker's like that. Self absorbed is another adjective I'd use, as he comes off in interviews.

 

Didn't we also see Clara's flat Post Danny in the Zygon Two parter?? Her Neighbors? I think there was a lot shown of her life.

I have to agree with you there on Moffat, he certainly wasn't a people person. Tho you would think that is a disqualifier in hiring a Showrunner..since the essence of that is managing people..

 

Moffat had already been showrunner on a few shows prior to Doctor Who. He can clearly work well with others, at least as far as scriptwriting is concerned, it's just the in the public spotlight and social aspects of running Doctor Who he clearly wasn't cut out for. To be fair though, I suspect BBC may have pressured Moffat in this regard, given how much of a showman RTD was. I think if Moffat had a say in the matter, he probably wouldn't be doing Comic Cons, international publicity tours and bowling with Chris Hardwick. He'd probably just limit himself to DVD interviews and commentaries, and maybe the occasional promotional fluff for DWM.

 

Indeed. Showrunning and public relations are two very different animals and shouldn't be judged as one, nor as the same example as to how someone deals with people.

 

I suppose, that sure removes a lot of the problems off of him, seems to be a really good excuse. Tho not cut out for it, doesn't mean his attitude towards fans and the media needed to be so snotty and jerky. Not to mention the fact he doesn't think anything he's ever done was wrong, except having to promote the show. So there's also that. When you're smug, and think you are infallable, then it's a good thing that public relations isn't your forte, cause thats the perfect excuse to pass off childish behavior. JNT would be proud and impressed.

 

He's Scottish. In Scotland, that's considered polite.

 

^ I don't know, when I went to Scotland, I found them to be amazingly warm and friendly. And, I'm not counting the people I was visiting but random people out in public. Shoot, at a function I attended, one nice woman I didn't know came up to me and kissed me on the lips saying, "I have to kiss the American!" So, I like Scotland . . . a lot!

 

Just hurling shit? As if much of the criticism wasn't valid.
Keep in mind that no one went into series 5 and beyond wanting to hate the show under Moffat, almost the entire fandom went gaga with excitement, the episodes he wrote under Davies were so well received almost everyone expected one of the greatest eras of Doctor Who ever so something must have happened to change that perception and that was obviously Moffat's showrunning and attitude.

Moffat's season arcs were very obvious right from the start, there was zero sublety with the camera zooming in on a crack at the end of series five episodes for example, there was the laughable attempt at creating tension with the doctor being killed "for real" in series six, there was Clara who didn't start as a character but as a mystery to be solved and then became a character I despised. There was Moffat's need to deal with big events just so he could put his stamp on the series not because it was necessary like the regeneration limit. There was him ignoring the private lifes of the companions although they were at times important (like when super important screwed up best friend Melody was introduced five minutes before she regenerated into River ... why not introduce Melody earlier if that's the plan?), there was his obsession with timey wimeyness when a simpler story would have often been better.
The prime example for Moffat not using the perfect story he set up himself is Amy's and Rory's exit. In the first half of series seven they were CLEARLY moving on with their lives, getting ready so say goodbye to the doctor and leaving the Tardis for good but then they get suddenly written out by being zapped by an angel and being stuck in the past in New York in a time the doctor cannot go to without blowing up the universe or something and this is presented as final and impossible to circumvent although the very obvious solution would have been to land the Tardis in Jersey and take a train if you can't land in New York.

Moffat often acted like his farts didn't smell and he often had an "You just don't get it" when people actually got it, they just didn't like it!

 

I'm skeptical that Mels was part of Moffat's plan when he sketched out Series 6 and wrote "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon." I don't know if he didn't have any idea how to link the little girl at the end of "Day of the Moon" with River or if he realized that he had no way of dealing with the emotional devastation of a mother losing her child in "A Good Man Goes to War" would produce, but either way Mels is a poor solution to either problem -- she introduces more questions than answers as a bridge between the little girl in 1969 and Amy's contemporary in 1996, and a childhood friend fifteen years earlier is no substitute for losing a child in the present, no matter what MOffat says.

For what it's worth, I have always thought Amy, Rory, and River ran a giant scam on the Doctor to get him to leave Amy and Rory alone, and the Doctor could have taken the TARDIS back to New York at any time but he didn't because River told him he couldn't when he was utterly devastated and he believed it.

A prime example was his defense of "In the Forest of the Night," for which he said that people who didn't like Boyce's episode didn't see how beautiful and magical it was. No, the reason I didn't like the episode is that I was screaming "What the [REDACTED] is this [REDACTED]?" at my television because everything about it, from the premise to the characters to the development to the resolution, was appallingly stupid, and no amount of magical realism or emotional poetry could make up for that.