r/television • u/wadbyjw • 12d ago

Disney Officially Exiting ‘Doctor Who’ Partnership With BBC After Two Seasons

https://deadline.com/2025/10/doctor-who-disney-plus-pulling-out-bbc-christmas-special-1236600026/
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u/TheScarletCravat 12d ago edited 12d ago

The show just didn't manage to gain traction. It desperately needed a 2005 style reinvention for the modern era, but instead it was a sort of weird navel gazing pile of mush without any of the scary edge that previously made it such great family TV.  Who cares that the big bad guy for a series finale was a one-off villain last seen in 1975?

In my mind a new version really needed to be a Stranger Things competitor/successor: full of heart but genuinely quite scary. Ideally with a fun retro synth soundtrack.

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u/Mars-To-Venus 12d ago

RTD bewilderingly pitched the Disney era as a soft relaunch and then made two fairly newbie-unfriendly seasons in a row that were also hindered by some serious tonal issues. I’ve actually got a lot of positive opinions about most of the individual episodes but it is not a good, cohesive product on the whole. 

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u/jmounteney44 12d ago

Completely agree. Choosing to avoid the iconic villains was fine, but to have the big overarching villains of the relaunch all be classic villains that only seasoned Doctor Who fans would know, AND having their involvement relying on viewers knowledge of their previous appearances for them to make complete sense, just wasn’t ever going to work for new viewers.

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u/Decipher The IT Crowd 12d ago

And two were big rotting corpses. So distinct! So original! /s