Doctor Who made the cover of TV Guide for the first time this week:
The was the result of a fan vote, which leads TV Guide to conclude that Doctor Who is “cool. Mainstream, even.”
Which makes it sound like “mainstream” is an inevitable upshot of “cool.” Which makes no sense at all. As bronxbee — who gave me the heads-up on the TVG appearance — notes, this is “depressing.”
If it’s mainstream, it can’t be cool.
*sigh*
The article itself isn’t online, and it would be uncool for me to post scans of the whole thing. But rest assured that it is the most basic sort of introduction to the show possible, which suggests that the show has not in fact gone mainstream — if it had, this article would be very different. In the U.K., everyone knows what the TARDIS is, and who the Daleks are, even if they’ve never seen the show in their life. This sort of thing would never appear in a U.K. publication:
So perhaps we shouldn’t be too depressed yet.
I’ll leave you all to figure out what the hell TV Guide’s designers were thinking with that hideous old-fashioned “science fictiony” typeface…
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
