Doctor Who Producer Confirms What’s Holding the Show Up

The current Doctor Who hiatus is hitting everyone hard. Fans, critics, former cast members, and previous writers have all weighed in on everything from Ncuti Gatwa’s regeneration and who former companion Billie Piper is meant to be playing at the end of the season 15 finale to whether we can expect to see the show back on our screens again at all. (Maybe ever!) It doesn’t help that the flagship series is stuck in a weird limbo where it hasn’t been officially renewed yet, a new Doctor hasn’t been named, and all fans have to look forward to is a spinoff (The War Between the Land and the Sea) that it’s not clear anyone even really wants. Understandably, everyone’s on a hair trigger about it, but the drama of late has been particularly out of control. 

Former Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman, who penned the Christopher Eccleston episode “Dalek,” recently declared the show to be “as dead as we’ve ever known it”. To be fair, he was speaking about the fact that the lack of clarity surrounding the identity of Piper’s character and a clearly defined next Doctor has left the show in a strange limbo that the franchise has never really experienced before. But his words were definitely not appreciated by some of the folks behind the scenes at Bad Wolf, the production studio that makes the show.

“‘As dead as we’ve ever known.’ That’s really rude, actually. And really untrue,” executive producer Jane Tranter said during an interview with BBC Radio Wales. 

Tranter, who was part of the BBC team that brought the show back in 2005, and who returned along with showrunner Russell T. Davies and friends for the Disney seasons as part of the Bad Wolf team, went on to lay out an explanation of what most Whovians have likely guessed already. Nothing can happen in terms of announcements or news about Doctor Who’s future until the original terms of the BBC’s deal with Disney are met. 

“The plans for Doctor Who are really simply this: the BBC and BBC Studios had a partnership with Disney+ for 26 episodes. We are currently 21 episodes down into that 26-episode run. We have got another five episodes of The War Between the Land and the Sea to come. At some point after that, decisions will be made together with all of us about what the future of Doctor Who entails.”

Rumors have been flying for ages that Disney isn’t planning to renew this partnership, but what everyone seems to be forgetting is that the BBC has said, repeatedly, that the corporation is firmly committed to the show. (“Doctor Who is going nowhere” is a direct quote!). And Tranter’s comments reiterate that fact. 

“It’s a 60-year-old franchise. It’s been going for 20 years nonstop since we brought it back in 2005 [when I worked at the BBC]. You would expect it to change, wouldn’t you? Nothing continues the same always, or it shouldn’t continue the same always. So it will change in some form or another. But the one thing we can all be really clear of is that the Doctor will be back and everyone, including me, including all of us, just has to wait patiently to see when — and who.”

The plain fact of the matter is: It’s going to take some time to figure out what’s next for the show, and we all need to accept that fact. If decisions can’t be made (or at least announced) until after The War Between the Land and the Sea airs, then endlessly going around the same questions is deeply futile. The BBC and Bad Wolf seem to have been as direct as they can be that the show’s returning, while staying honest about the fact that we have no idea when that might be. And while it’s natural to feel nervous about all the uncertainty surrounding our favorite Time Lord, we’re probably just going to have to get used to dealing with it for some time to come.