Last week came the news that I’ve been dreading for a long time as a Doctor Who fan: The series has once again been cancelled. Well, more or less. On Wednesday, June 10, the BBC announced that they were cancelling the planned Christmas special that was promised for Christmas 2026, and that they will “put Doctor Who out to competitive tender.” Does that mean it’s over? The answer to that is somewhat complicated, but the short of it is that we won’t see the Doctor on our television screens again for at least a few years. Let’s talk a bit about what that means, what went wrong, and what can or should be done for the future.
Is Doctor Who Cancelled?
First and foremost, Christmas is cancelled. Russell T. Davies says on Instagram: “For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor.” That quote has a lot of people cheesed off right now, and rightfully so. We were told months ago to expect a Christmas special as part of the BBC’s commitment to keeping the show going. It feels like a bit of a betrayal that nobody had even lifted a finger to get started on this special yet.
It’s also annoying because the last season left us with a lot of loose ends, including Rogue (Jonathan Groff), the Doctor’s brief and mysterious love interest, being lost in a hellish dimension, the return of the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford) to the show after about 40 years, and, perhaps most importantly, the Doctor regenerating into a 16th incarnation that looks an awful lot like Rose Tyler (Billie Piper). I assumed that Billie Piper would get to be the Doctor for the Christmas special, and she would regenerate into someone else by the end of the episode, but now even that won’t happen, which seems pretty unfair to Piper.
They said the show was being put out to competitive tender. Whenever you put something out somewhere, that doesn’t sound like it’s coming back, does it? It sounds like they’re saying, “The show’s been put out to pasture.” What it really means is that the show is now open to competitive bids from new showrunners and production companies to take over the show. That doesn’t give us a lot of details except to tell us that the show probably won’t be back for a while. Quoting anonymous “insiders,” Deadline reported that the show is expected to be off the air until at least 2028. Honestly, I won’t be holding my breath for that.
Russell T. Davies, however, wants us to understand that it’s not a cancellation. In an interview with Gaydio (that was partially transcribed by Radio Times), Davies explained: “It’s extraordinary to see newspapers who should know better saying the show has been cancelled It’s the opposite. It’s been put out to tender, and I understand that’s an industry phrase and people might not understand what a show being put out to tender means.”
Later, he continued, explaining the process and saying: “Being put out to tender means – and this will happen to every BBC show, it’s happened to Casualty, it’s happened to the weather—It means the program is pitched to be made by an independent company, as opposed to the BBC.”
But that hardly sounds like the BBC is really committed to the future of Doctor Who if they’re opening it up for other companies to take over. I feel like Davies feels the need to make us all feel better about what is, essentially, a second cancellation and an entrance into the second stretch of “The Wilderness Years.”
What Went Wrong?
I feel like every testosterone-addled jackass with a YouTube channel is out there giving his opinion about how Doctor Who got the ax because it “went woke,” which is a laughable position to take. I consider myself an omnifan of Doctor Who, in that I’ve seen every episode of the classic and modern series and I love them all the same, from 1-15. So, coming from a huge superfan, what do I think went wrong? Personally, I don’t think the show ever got bad. I think what ultimately happened was a matter of perception and some really bad marketing decisions.
Much like the Classic Series of Doctor Who that ran from 1963-1989, it wasn’t the Doctor that was helming the show at the end who spelled doom for the franchise; it was the one before him. As some people have pointed out, both the 7th Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) in the 1980s and the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) in 2025 were Scottish actors whose Doctors fought the Rani and, by coincidence, they both ended up being the last Doctor of their era. That’s an amusing coincidence, but, like I said, neither McCoy or Gatwa were the reason the show got cancelled. In both cases, they were part of a really badly thought-out attempt to rescue the show from its inevitable fate.
The 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) era was wildly unpopular in a way that was not entirely dissimilar to the unpopularity of the 6th Doctor (Colin Baker) in the 1980s. But where I think Baker’s downfall came from him playing a harsher, less likable version of the character amidst darker and darker episodes that parents’ groups were complaining about, I think Jodie Whittaker’s lack of popularity can be boiled down to one thing: She’s a woman.
As much as people try to say that their complaints about the 13th Doctor era were “about the writing” and not about her being a woman, there was such a public meltdown from so many “fans” about her gender before a single 13th Doctor episode came out that I really doubt the authenticity of such claims. I’m not saying that there aren’t other reasons people didn’t like the 13th Doctor, but I think, by and large, a lot of people jumped ship because apparently the TARDIS only operates properly if the driver has a penis.
Still, Whittaker’s era was noticeably different; I will admit that. The show felt less whimsical in those years, less silly and wacky. I’m tempted to call it a drier Who, but that sounds like I’m calling it boring when I’m not. Whittaker’s era, for example, gave us some of the best historical episodes of the modern era of the show. The Rosa Parks episode, “Rosa,” is the 13th Doctor’s absolute masterpiece, but episodes like “Demons of the Punjab” and “The Witchfinders” were fascinating looks into real history. It was less about daleks and cybermen (although they did show up) and more about a lighthearted Doctor dancing through history.
But there was one other thing about the Whittaker era that totally turned off toxic fans, and that’s the infamous Timeless Child plotline where we learned that the man we considered the 1st Doctor (William Hartnell) was far from being the first. Countless regenerations came before him because the Doctor’s not actually a Time Lord; they’re a creature from another dimension that the Time Lords stole regeneration technology from. That may seem like a big leap, but in the 1976 story “The Brain of Morbius,” the Doctor’s previous regenerations flash before his eyes, and they include more than just the actors we’ve seen on the show, implying that there are more regenerations hiding in the Doctor’s past. So the Timeless Child arc essentially just confirmed what we had thought since 1976.
Similarly, there was an abandoned storyline from the 1980s called “The Cartmel Masterplan” in which script editor Andrew Cartmel tried to imply that the Doctor was secretly a sort of Time Lord god called The Other who, along with Rassilon and Omega, founded Time Lord society and invented time travel for their people. Some fans look at the Timeless Child as the ultimate fulfillment of the Cartmel Masterplan, and it’s not that far off. So no, I don’t think the Timeless Child is a complete disaster of a storyline. It had its flaws (why was the Fugitive Doctor’s TARDIS a fucking phone box?!) but, at the very least, it’s not any more nonsensical than the 8th Doctor (Paul McGann) saying he was “half human on my mother’s side” in the 1996 made-for-TV movie.
But whatever you think about Jodie Whittaker or her era, there’s no denying that viewership was down and the franchise was in crisis at the end of her era. Some of that can be chalked up to the fact that the show moved to Sundays during Whittaker’s era, which has lower ratings expectations than Saturday night television, but even that doesn’t fully explain the dip in viewership completely. That’s when there was an attempt to rescue the show from itself that went horrifically wrong. The BBC tried to bring back viewers by bringing back Russell T. Davies, the showrunner who had engineered the show’s revival in 2005 and ran the show during the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant years. That was a big mistake that would lead to further mistakes.
Everything about the plan to save the show involved returning to the past. In addition to bringing back the old showrunner, the show brought back the old composer (Murray Gold), an old companion (Catherine Tate as Donna Noble), and even an old Doctor, as Jodie Whittaker regenerated back into David Tennant. Rather than forging a bold new direction for the show, the production seemed to be promising a retreat into the glory days of the show.
While that was already a dubious strategy to begin with, it becomes even more dubious when you consider that the show never lived up to its promise of a return to normalcy. Instead, the second Russell T. Davies era experimented by leaning harder into fantasy elements than ever before and introducing random musical numbers that seemed more fantastical than necessary to the storytelling. While I didn’t mind this change, I can kind of understand why others did because it was a strange thing to pull off while promising the fanbase a return to the status quo.
Meanwhile, Russell T. Davies saw that the show, at 13 seasons, was pretty intimidating to potential new fans, particularly young fans, because who wants to jump onto a show at Season 14? He was right about this, as there was now a lot of lore that you needed to know to be able to follow the series after so many seasons back on the air. In 2005, Davies had engineered the show’s return to television by restarting the show at Season 1, even though it was technically the show’s 27th season overall. In 2023, when Davies brought Disney+ on board as the streaming partner for the show, he restarted the season numbering again with Season 1.
That’s a good idea, but the problem was that he didn’t actually reboot the show in any way. In 2005, the new season numbering worked because you could start from Season 1 with no knowledge of the classic series and follow what was happening. Davies slowly reintroduced the concept of the series and all of the main characters and villains for a brand-new audience. The 2023 reset didn’t really work that way. The new era of the show, which Davies tried to dub “The Whoniverse,” started with the 14th Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Noble back again after they parted ways in Season 4, and then it started pulling out some of the most obscure classic series villains you could think of like The Toymaker, The Rani, Omega, and Sutekh. Even though it was called Season 1 again, the first season of “The Whoniverse” was a terrible jumping-on point for the series. You needed a lot of foreknowledge to really follow it.
That’s part of the reason why some are arguing that the show needs a break. There’s an argument to be made that it needs some time off the air to reset and get ready for a new audience down the road. But I don’t think the show really needs to go anywhere, and it certainly doesn’t need another 16-year hiatus like it had from 1989 to 2005 (save for the 1996 movie). I think Davies had the right instinct to reset the show at Season 1, but someone needs to actually do that properly and restart the show in a way that creates a proper jumping-on point for new viewers. That could look like a lot of different things, but I think it definitely needs a reset more than it needs some sort of break.
But instead, the show is being put out to tender, which means we probably won’t see it again for several years, which is disappointing. In the meantime, Big Finish is still doing audiobooks and audio dramas that will hopefully do something to fill the gap for hardcore fans like myself. But, as far as television goes, the Doctor won’t be coming to land his TARDIS in our living rooms for some time now.
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