...or it would've just been shown using Jodie Whittaker in a bad Peter Capaldi wig!
Season 11 slated for autumn 2018
- Thread starter Ar-Pharazon
- Start date
Well, Whithouse anyway said he was uninterested in the Doctor Who showrunner position regardless its length as he didn't want to run a show he didn't create.
Well, I guess it's one more thing for me to be grateful to Moffat for. And I will miss him terribly when he goes. As much as he tears his hair out over it, it seems like he often does his best work under enormous pressure ("The Day of the Doctor") or when he's feeling so burnt out that he wants to leave ("Heaven Sent," "The Husbands of River Song," "World Enough & Time," "The Doctor Falls"). And while we haven't actually seen it yet, I suspect "Twice Upon a Time" will end up being a brilliant final adventure for Capaldi and will manage to leave us desperately wanting more.
I'm also going to miss Moffat's regular column in Doctor Who Magazine. That's usually the only part of DWM that I read and it's always hilarious!
I'm still bummed out that Whithouse turned it down. I have substantially more faith in the guy who wrote "Vampires of Venice," "The God Complex," "Under the Lake," & "Before the Flood" than I do in the guy that wrote "The Hungry Earth," "Cold Blood," "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship," & "The Power of Three." (Not that Chibnall's episodes have been bad. They just haven't been nearly as transcendent as Whithouse's. IMO, Whithouse is to the Moffat era what Moffat was to the RTD era.)
Still, I don't know why the BBC can't find a hungry young junior producer anxious for the exposure of working on a high profile show like Doctor Who. In the U.S., it's often the other way around. Producers of hit TV shows will sometimes see their own creations forcibly wrested from their hands and given to someone else for a while. IIRC, this happened to Gilmore Girls during its final regular season, and Scrubs too. It happened to Charmed pretty early on in its run (Season 3, I think?). Dan Harmon lost control of Community during Season 4 but got it back during Seasons 5 & 6. Eric Kripke wanted to end Supernatural after Season 5 but the CW wanted to keep it going and had the actors under contract for another year, so Season 6 went ahead against the wishes of its original creator (although I believe he came back in some kind of supervisory role in Season 7 and has been looking over the show ever since).
Then there are other shows where the original producer stays on but doesn't really do much and delegates the actual work to other people. AFAIK, that's basically what Eric Kripke has been doing on Supernatural from Season 7 onwards. During the last couple seasons of Enterprise, Brannon Braga was still billed as executive producer but seemed to be gradually stepping back and letting Manny Coto take over the day-to-day duties as showrunner. And has Dick Wolf actually done anything on Law & Order for the last decade other than cash the checks? Heck, even the BBC knows what that kind of arrangement looks like since that's basically what RTD & Chibnall were doing when they were working together on the first couple seasons of Torchwood.
My point is, between a curious dearth of producers and the wiping out of huge chunks of TV history from the 1950s-'70s, the British look pretty amateurish when compared to the Americans & Canadians in terms of mass TV production.
I'm also going to miss Moffat's regular column in Doctor Who Magazine. That's usually the only part of DWM that I read and it's always hilarious!
I'm still bummed out that Whithouse turned it down. I have substantially more faith in the guy who wrote "Vampires of Venice," "The God Complex," "Under the Lake," & "Before the Flood" than I do in the guy that wrote "The Hungry Earth," "Cold Blood," "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship," & "The Power of Three." (Not that Chibnall's episodes have been bad. They just haven't been nearly as transcendent as Whithouse's. IMO, Whithouse is to the Moffat era what Moffat was to the RTD era.)
Still, I don't know why the BBC can't find a hungry young junior producer anxious for the exposure of working on a high profile show like Doctor Who. In the U.S., it's often the other way around. Producers of hit TV shows will sometimes see their own creations forcibly wrested from their hands and given to someone else for a while. IIRC, this happened to Gilmore Girls during its final regular season, and Scrubs too. It happened to Charmed pretty early on in its run (Season 3, I think?). Dan Harmon lost control of Community during Season 4 but got it back during Seasons 5 & 6. Eric Kripke wanted to end Supernatural after Season 5 but the CW wanted to keep it going and had the actors under contract for another year, so Season 6 went ahead against the wishes of its original creator (although I believe he came back in some kind of supervisory role in Season 7 and has been looking over the show ever since).
Then there are other shows where the original producer stays on but doesn't really do much and delegates the actual work to other people. AFAIK, that's basically what Eric Kripke has been doing on Supernatural from Season 7 onwards. During the last couple seasons of Enterprise, Brannon Braga was still billed as executive producer but seemed to be gradually stepping back and letting Manny Coto take over the day-to-day duties as showrunner. And has Dick Wolf actually done anything on Law & Order for the last decade other than cash the checks? Heck, even the BBC knows what that kind of arrangement looks like since that's basically what RTD & Chibnall were doing when they were working together on the first couple seasons of Torchwood.
My point is, between a curious dearth of producers and the wiping out of huge chunks of TV history from the 1950s-'70s, the British look pretty amateurish when compared to the Americans & Canadians in terms of mass TV production.
This. There's a chunk of fandom who sure take the fun out of liking something.
Well, with this story about how the Christmas Special is an extra on top of an extra, it does explain why the original announcement of the Moffat/Chibnall changeover was ambiguous over whether Christmas '17 was going to be Moffat's last or Chibnall's first; there wasn't going to be a special at all. It's a good thing they didn't make that explicit. Moff's probably right, there's not a chance they'd get space back for a while if they let their "claim" on the day pass.
The amazing thing is how late it came. It does seem that "The Doctor Falls" was shot as the Regeneration episode (which it clearly is) then months later they reshot the ending and added in David Bradley.
Most of the time, I do.
Though, to look at it the other way, they really have run the Christmas aspect into the ground.
Would a November special be so bad? It would remove the pressure to make it Christmassy.
I still don't think this would have been a good idea. What it Whithouse's (or whoevers) season had been brilliant? Would have been odd to jettison a great showrunner because you'd already promised the job to Chibnall
Quoted for Truth. In fairness I have less of an issue with Chibnall's work that I did in his Torchwood series 1 days, but I still don't think he's ever written anything to the level of Moffat or RTD or Whithouse, and that's my worry (but then again if he surrounds himself with great writers and his idea of having a writers room takes off then this may not be an issue. There's no rule that says the showrunner has to be the best writer on the show I guess
I don't take what Whithouse has said publicly at face value. He can't exactly say, "I didn't like the deal they offered," not when, as a working producer, he hopes to turn around and sell the BBC material down the road. Saying "I'm not interested in producing other people's stuff" gets Whithouse out easily in a way that doesn't put himself and the BBC on antagonistic footing.
That also makes sense of the pre-season marketing and trailers, which suggested very strongly a pre-Christmas regeneration. I'm not talking about ending the trailer with the mid-season fakeout regeneration. I'm talking about the whole "Tune in for Peter Capaldi's final adventures" angle. There was very much a sense, especially from BBC America, that this run of twelve episodes was the end, full stop. Because, as now seems likely, at the time the marketing plan was made, that was the intention.
That's a valid point. Some people would look at that as an opportunity -- "I can pull out all the stops and do everything I ever wanted" -- while others would see it as a limitation.
The showrunner also has to have a vision for he wants the show to be like. And, then the leadership skills to keep that in place. Otherwise, you just get a mess or hodge podge. Can Chibnall come up with a unique take of Who that translates well on the screen. He doesn't have to be the best writer but needs to be able to do that and surround himself with good people.
What's the hook to get people to tune in in November? Christmas specials take advantage of the fact that it's Christmas day, and people don't have much else to do anyway, so why not a Doctor Who special? This results in a larger percentage of people tuning in for the broadcast of the episode than you'd get in November when say life, work, some other shit gets in the way and people decide against watching it live and settle for DVR, streaming and all the various alternatives.
Also, what pressure to make things "Christmassy?" RTD's only "Christmassy" special was The Christmas Invasion, the others were more or less ordinary storylines that just happened to take place at Christmas. It was Moffat who felt compelled to make the specials "Christmassy" and even he gave that up after Last Christmas.
And its one story a year.
Bonfire Night! Every year the Doctor can thwart Guy Fawkes!
Last Christmas did feature Santa, even if he was imaginary. A Christmas Carol was a knock of of the Dickens tale.
And I'm not complaining about the Christmas themes, but plenty of people have.
A showrunner can also tinker with an otherwise brilliant script, no? For all we know some of the episodes that were "poorly written" might have been better if this theoretical tinkering hadn't taken place.
I'm still not sold, at all, on Chibnall after the second and third seasons of Broadchurch, but it was reported a while ago that he was instituting an American-style writers' room for his run on Who, as opposed to the Davies / Moffat styles of commissioning stories / scripts from independent writers and then rewriting them. That collaborative format is probably for the better because every creative type needs to remember that no, not everything is the greatest idea since sliced bread ... but I suppose it ultimately depends on who's involved.
I swear to fucking God, though, if Peter Harness gets to play around again, I'm out.
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