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‘Doctor Who’: Killed Off by Retcons (Not Wokeness)
When you change the core elements of an established hero, you change the appeal of the story and alienate new audiences at the same time
Why did the ratings of this long-lived, heritage TV brand drop, slowly at first, then dramatically, after Doctor Who found a home on the all-conquering universe of Disney+? The answer is a retcon too far. It’s a cautionary tale all showrunners need to be wary of in the current world of reboots and reimaginings of classic shows.
Who killed Doctor Who?
In a word, the writers. This is not a complaint about so-called wokeness, or ideology or any culture war nonsense like that. Doctor Who, like Star Trek and all the sci-fi shows of the postwar TV boom years, was always on the edgy liberal side of the status quo — hence its enduring appeal through eras of conservative politics. The themes of equality, young people asserting their independence, sexual liberation and challenging the status quo are hallmarks of the era that gave us TV sci-fi and adventure shows. It is both absurd and wrong to cite any of the Doctor Who series from 2005 as being more progressive in its underlying politics than previous series between 1963 and 1989.
