mswyrr at the sea and the mirror doesn’t like the way Series 6 has been going, and looks at one possible reason in “Doctor Who and Where The Fail Comes From”:
Over on TWOP’s Gender in Doctor Who thread, someone mentioned that every single writer and director of Doctor Who Series 6 is male. I was somewhat boggled by that. I thought: seriously, not even one woman? Have we gone so far backwards now people don’t even engage in tokenism to make themselves look marginally better anymore? And then, because I’d just seen an episode with a grand total of one character of color who (of course!) died within the first three minutes of the episode (literally, I checked the timestamp), I wondered if all the writers were white.
So I did some research.
The short version is that, yes, 100% of the writers and directors were both male and white. Because Steven Moffat can’t even be bothered to make a little effort to find one person of color and/or one woman. This explained a lot for me about why the show has been drenched in fail. The people at the top can’t even bestir themselves to give a shit about their racist and sexist hiring practices. In all of Britain, tell me there isn’t a single person of color and/or woman who would like to write or director for Doctor Who. Tell me, and you’d be a liar.
I do find it a little troubling that there are no women at all involved at this level of the show this year. Women and people of color don’t automatically make everything better, and men don’t automatically screw everything up. But a diversity of perspectives can only make something like Doctor Who better. And we’re getting only a narrow perspective this year. And it’s the same narrow perspective that blinders our culture overall. Doctor Who is — or should be — all about seeing beyond that.
What do you think? Is the fact that the production is dominated by white men a problem?
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
