The BBC has released a teaser for “The Time of the Doctor”:
Think we’ll finally find out why the TARDIS exploded and the answer to the question “Doctor who?” Nah, me neither.
Check out this gorgeous poster from BBC America:
“The Time of the Doctor” airs on December 25th on BBC One at 7:30pm, and on BBC America at 9pm EST.
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
I’m guessing yes to the first question and no to the second. But the more important question is: Will we enjoy the episode?
I first started watching New Who during the reruns of Series 5 and 6 leading up to 7, and then went back to catch up with the rest, so, question: was “The End Of Time” and the change from 10 to 11 as publicized and momentous as this one? Or is it because DW in general has become so much more popular recently and the BBC is playing up to the larger audience?
Depends on where you were. In the UK it’s all been relentlessly pushed ever since the relaunch in 2005. In the US I think it’s varied more. Don’t know about other places.
As above, in the UK the show has been on super saturation overdrive since 2005 — and that hit its peak in 2009, in the lead-up to Tennant’s farewell.
For the entire Christmas season, every station identification involved David Tennant horsing around in the snow. They ran regular cinema trailers for his final few episodes before major Hollywood blockbusters. This was as high-profile as the show has ever been anywhere.
I don’t know if you recall when ABC rebranded itself A-Beatle-C in the buildup to the Beatles Anthology series. That seemed like ridiculous media oversaturation at the time, and it was just one of several major commercial networks in an era when most people had cable.
In the UK, for all of the battle that you get from ITV, Channel 4, and the satellite networks, the BBC is basically the face of television in the way that Google is the face of the Internet — except more so, as you have to pay the BBC a yearly tax just for owning a television set.
So, this was enormously well-promoted stuff — in the UK. Over here, even in 2009, you still kind of had to dig, or to walk in the right circles, to be aware that the show had returned — or that it ever had existed in the first place.
Now I won’t say that the position has reversed, exactly, but in the US the show is currently enjoying a level of popularity — indeed sheer awareness — that constantly baffles me. I mean, it’s on the cover to TV Guide now. Walking through the mall, every other shop seems to have a dedicated section for Doctor Who tchotchkes. Although it will never reach the broad popular awareness of Lost or even Battlestar Galactica, as of 2013 it seems to be reaching pretty much everyone Stateside who would be into a show like this.
To this we can attribute both BBC America’s strong marketing since 2010 — which beyond its general quality and scale, so far as I know, constitutes the first time the show has ever in any form been advertised in the US — and, I think, Moffat’s… how should I put this… his CW-leaning tonal and narrative sensibilities.
Under his lead the show has become a shiny teenyboppy show that Twilight and Harry Potter fans can adopt. It has pretty young leads; lots of twisty, angsty plotting with no real, damaging consequence; and a shift from message storytelling toward narrative solipsism, whereby the show is less about social issues and abstract concepts, and more about itself and its own mythology. Which is the kind of stuff that really works over here.
That’s just my reading, of course. Feel free to ignore it. Point is, between the marketing and the changed direction of the show it’s popular over here in a way that would have been unthinkable even during the Tennant years. Meanwhile, In the UK… well, people still watch it. When you count time-shifted ratings and online streaming, it still gets roughly the same viewers as it has since 2005. The difference is that compared to Davies’ tenure the viewers tend to be less of a mass, casual audience and more of the kind of people who would make a concerted effort to seek it out.
And while you couldn’t accuse the BBC of under-promoting the show these days, particularly in and around the 50th anniversary, it isn’t receiving quite the same level of blitz saturation and general media interest that it did during Tennant’s reign.
It’s a subjective thing, perhaps, but if we’re talking UK publicity then if Tennant’s departure received a full 10 in the This Is What Is Happening On TV department, Smith’s has dialed down to maybe a 7 or an 8. It’s big news if you’re one of the people who watches Doctor Who, which is admittedly a pretty huge audience, but it’s not the only thing that matters on television.
i like this poster a lot more than the other one.
Me too.
I’ll certainly watch it, but I lost all anticipation when I saw the Cybermen were going to be in it. Ugh.
Well, for my part, I no longer care why the TARDIS exploded*, and I never expected an answer to the question**.
* Because it was too long ago.
** Partly because I don’t think there is answer, and partly because I assumed it was the question that was important.
Wouldn’t mind having that on the wall, no sir. Not one bit.