Earlier today, BBC announced that they “will put Doctor Who out to competitive tender this year,” and that as part of that, they will not proceed with producing a 2026 holiday special.
In a social media post, Russell T. Davies said that no script or casting had been done on said holiday special.
I’m sure whoever comes next will LOVE the Billie Piper cliffhanger…
That would probably be the first question in the technical section of the tender:
Please explain, in no more than 500 words, how you would extract the series from the following entirely random post-credits scene…
Follow up questions elsewhere indicate that the BBC is open to both continuing this continuity or doing an outright reboot. The latter would just leave the cliffhanger unresolved, but hopefully appeal to new viewers who don’t want to spend decades watching old content as homework.
I just hope that they do a better job than other shows of respecting the old content. Podcast interviews with the classic Trek “expert” on the season of Discovery written during lockdown revealed that he wasn’t familiar with the franchise. He became known as the expert because he worked from home and was fast with Memory Alpha. That explains why so many of the old references felt like they missed the connotation to me. He’s never seen most of the episodes they ended up referring to. (He has now. He started watching four per day between seasons to get caught up, and has now seen it all.)
What does “competitive tender” mean? Is that the same as when I take a piece of meat and beat it with a hammer, but doing it along side someone else to determine whose is the less tough?
That means any production company who wants to invest is welcome to pitch. Think construction, but without any rules that require them to hire the lowest bidder. Any entity willing to share the bill could end up helping BBC make Doctor Who.
The way Disney+ seemed to try to buy Doctor Who, and then just funded a bunch of it, or how HBO seemed to do that to Sesame Street. Okay, I think I get it.
Yes. Then, somewhat predictably, buying DW didn’t add to Disney+ subscriptions. It’s almost like Doctor Who fans were already subscribed to the streaming service that had Star Wars and the MCU, so Disney spent a bunch of production money and very little on marketing and saw a minimal return on investment. Weird.