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Ah, beans, says Alasdair Stuart of the latest Doctor Who news…

Okay, so it turns out that the Doctor Who situation may be worse than has been reported. The day after the 2026 Christmas special was cancelled and, possibly, revealed to be vapourware, Deadline has a report about how the show is viewed and it’s bad in the short term, and good in the mid term.

Short term, the term that’s been used to describe how to turn the show around is ‘surgery’, which is perhaps needlessly provocative. Regardless the feeling, Deadline’s sources say, was that the Christmas Special was a sticking plaster and it became obvious this was nowhere near the level of attention needed. That attention, in their estimation, would take years. 2028 has been cited as a likely return.

On the one hand, panic ensues. On the other, two and a half years is not that long in the streaming era although one producer made it clear they felt that was ‘early’. It’s also worth noting that ‘crunch’, the term for when something is produced on an accelerated timeline in the video games industry, never works. If you crunch a project, you get it out on time at the expense of its quality and the health of the creatives. I know this from personal experience. So, this at least is a ‘release it when it’s good.’ situation and I support that.

Where it gets interesting, and depressing, and ultimately hopeful, is in the four anonymous, respected UK drama producers Deadline reached out to about the show. Personally, I’d like some assurance they weren’t all white guys, but we go on faith when we go. Which is a resource in scant supply where the show is concerned both from fans frustrated with the recent scripts and the industry itself:

‘One top producer exclaimed that “you would have to be mad” to take on the show. “[It’s a] bit of a nightmare for any producer in this market with the shadow of the Disney fallout,” was the verdict of another highly-regarded producer.’

Honestly, I get it. The Disney+ deal was widely touted as a massive and instant success and it just wasn’t. That gives the show some stigma both as an artistic enterprise and a product. There’s also, and I suspect the producers are being very tactful here, the fan problem.

Any long form franchise entertainment has two problems. The first is attracting new viewers and the second is convincing the people who’ve been with it for a while that new folks aren’t a threat. For something like Doctor Who that’s doubly challenging given the way the show has become a UK institution in the worst of ways; something we kick around while pretending we enjoy it, when, in fact, what we enjoy is the idea of it when we first encountered it and not in the present.

That dissonance breeds the darkest elements of fandom. The elements that sit inside legitimate criticism and turn it into a wasp apple for bigotry. You see it everywhere, in every major franchise in some form. Toxic fandom is rampant right now, people sacrificing empathy and understanding for a barrierless, consequence-free world of lousy behaviour. That’s how we get to Isa Briones having to tell Broadway theatregoers to not heckle her big number with jokes about The Pitt. It’s how we get ‘It’s just the bad writing’ being used as a shield for racism and bigotry. It’s also, at least in part, how we get to genuinely bad writing which the show has had more than its fair share of recently.

But there’s still hope. There’s always hope, it’s Doctor Who. Hope is its job. The article closes with this:

‘A person close to Doctor Who in recent years said the show will survive: “If you look at the longevity of Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek, these are valuable commodities over generations. The BBC is lucky to have one of these, and this should be no more than a bump in the road if they approach it properly.’

Doctor Who is a generational myth. It’s an idea. Ideas, to quote V For Vendetta, are bulletproof. They’re cancel proof too. If the show’s handled right, and parked for several years, there’s the opportunity for absence to make the audience’s hearts grow fonder and new minds and fresh ideas to bring the show back to new heights. It’s not done; it can’t be done in any way that matters. It’s just fans, all of us, will have to do some heavy lifting keeping its memory going for a while and that’s something all of us, of any age, have a lot of experience of.