Let’s not beat around the bush here: I’m bloody ecstatic. This is fantastic news. That said, though, it’s interesting that a past showrunner has been put back in charge. This is a possible sign that the BBC, feeling that the current iteration of the show is not quite right, is looking back to past glories. Yet this is RTD, who since his first stint as showrunner has improved his already stellar reputation with such masterpieces as Cucumber, Years and Years, and the superlative It’s a Sin. This is not a writer you bring in for reasons of self-indulgent nostalgia. He’s radical, brilliant and is going to really annoy the people who don’t like Doctor Who to be “woke”. These are all very good things.
RTD is not my favourite post-2005 showrunner. That would be Steven Moffat. Yet the reason for this is that the Moff wrote first class clever science fantasy for male, middle aged geeks like me. RTD may have been (slightly) less to my taste, but he had a firm grip of how to get the show to appeal to non-geeks, children, women. He’s a showman.
When RTD revived Who in 2005 there were reasons for him to be cautious. He downplayed the show’s mythology and had to live down an ill-deserved reputation of wobbly sets, wobbly scripts and wobbly acting, whereas Moffat was able to take more risks and be less formulaic.
This time things are different. RTD- now the RTD of It’s a Sin rather than Casanova- will have very different ideas and want to do something new. I’m not expecting seasons of thirteen episodes with a present-future-past opening tryptich.
RTD has mentioned spin-offs in the vein of Marvel shows such as WandaVision etc. He clearly has big ideas, and they are 2021 ideas, not 2005 ideas.
This is very exciting news. Let there be much imbibing of alcoholic liquids.
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