[COLUMN] In this New Season, Russell T. Davies Reconstructs Doctor Who For the American Gaze | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Doctor Who has always had a complicated relationship to the United States.

The show is uniquely British in its aesthetics and sensibilities, to the point that the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) travels around time and space inside a big blue police box, an artifact of British history. The show’s conventions are rooted in British pop culture, to the point that it was a recurring joke on the classic series how closely the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey resembled the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Alien invasions tended to happen in London rather than New York.

However, the show has repeatedly tried to expand its audience and reach into the United States. For most of the classic series, Doctor Who was treated as a curiosity by American audiences. It aired on PBS and was occasionally a deep-cut background joke on a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation or The Simpsons. Still, there was a clear sense in which Doctor Who was, at least conceptually, the kind of show that could appeal to hardcore science-fiction fans.

Indeed, the show’s 20th anniversary special, “The Five Doctors”, actually premiered on American television ahead of its broadcast in Britain. The first attempt to revive the show following its cancellation was as with a television film for the American network Fox, starring Paul McCann and shooting in Vancouver. Philip Segel struck a deal that the production could function as “as a backdoor pilot, with the option for six additional episodes if it proved fruitful.” It did not prove fruitful.

When Russell T. Davies revived the show in 2005, his priority was homegrown audiences. International viewers were a secondary thought at best. The first season of the revival would be broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel roughly a year after their premiere on British television. Still, there was some indication that American audiences responded to the revived and revised take on the British cultural institution. Doctor Who powered a ratings spike for the Sci-Fi Channel.

There was some indication that Davies wanted to expand Doctor Who into the United States. There were a couple of episodes in those early seasons set in the United States, like “Dalek.” There was some second-unit shooting done in New York for the “Evolution of the Daleks” two-parter. In his final year as showrunner, Davies took Doctor Who to Comic Con, where it hosted a panel in “the second largest hall” of the San Diego Conference Center.

However, Doctor Who would really break into the States under the tenure of Davies’ successor, Steven Moffat. Starting with Moffat’s first season, Doctor Who moved over to BBC America, keeping the show in the BBC family. Moffat’s second season premiered with an epic two-part adventure that filmed on location in Utah and involved the Doctor (Matt Smith) with the moon landing. For the first time, the primary cast filmed on location in the United States.

Moffat’s second season as showrunner received a big push in America. New York was saturated with advertisements. For the first time, Doctor Who occupied Hall H at Comic Con, hosting “over 6,000 people.” In an appeal to American audiences, it was announced that, for the first time, episodes of the season would receive “same-day premieres” on BBC America. The sixth season would build heavily on American extraterrestrial mythology, culminating in a visit to “Area 52.”

Moffat’s era would deepen and develop the show’s relationship with its American audience. If Davies had brought Doctor Who back to life, Moffat brought it to America. The cast and crew would return to the United States to shoot scenes for “The Angels Take Manhattan” in Central Park. The show’s 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor”, would broadcast simultaneously in both Britain and America, premiering not just on the same day but in the same moment. It was a phenomenon.

However, Doctor Who remained a uniquely British television show in terms of sensibility and tone. The show’s cultural impact with arguable wain significantly during the tenure of Moffat’s successor Chris Chibnall, to the point that even British audiences on the television series Pointless struggled to name a single episode from the three seasons overseen by Chibnall. The Chibnall era would end with Davies returning for a second period as showrunner, an unprecedented development.

One of the boldest creative choices made by Davies was the decision to license the show’s international rights to Disney, so that the show would be released in international markets on Disney+. This was a controversial choice for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that it gave a stake in a British cultural institution to a massive American conglomerate. Davies apparently made that deal as a way to “prepare” for what he believes to be the inevitable end of the BBC.

The deal is interesting, because it recontextualizes Doctor Who in terms of the American market. Technically speaking Doctor Who premieres simultaneously on British and American television. In reality, the terms very much favor America. The show premieres on Disney+ at 7pm EST, effectively giving it a prime-time slot in American television. It releases simultaneously at midnight on Saturday on the BBC iPlayer, although it doesn’t broadcast on BBC One until Saturday evening.

This effectively shifts the conversation about Doctor Who from prime time on Saturday in the United Kingdom to prime time on Friday in the United States. It also has the effect of fragmenting the British audience. Hardcore fans will stay up until midnight to watch the episodes “live” on the iPlayer while casual audiences will wait another sixteen or seventeen hours, effectively diffusing the show’s cultural impact in the United Kingdom by making its television premiere feel like an afterthought.

It's important not to catastrophize this. After all, the show’s ratings have been in terminal decline since the Chris Chibnall era. In some ways, the shift is an acknowledgement of the inevitable. There may even be an argument that, in this era of an increasingly fragmented monoculture, it’s impossible for Doctor Who to survive as a popular mainstream prime-time television show and it must embrace its status as a cult streaming hit to sustain itself. Then again, streaming’s not doing too great.

Davies has been somewhat coy about the level of Disney’s involvement in the series. “People are, naturally, worried about American producers having notes on things. Well, don’t be,” the showrunner told Doctor Who Monthly. “[Disney is] giving excellent notes. And I’m here to tell you, you haven’t watched a drama on British television in 20 years that hasn’t had American notes on it. Everything is a co-production… it’s really, completely normal.”

Watching “Space Babies”, the first episode of Doctor Who to premiere on Disney+, one can sense the tension at play. In some ways, Davies is eager to assert the show’s continued Britishness. The episode’s monster, a creature built entirely from snot – a “bogeyman [grown] out of bogeys” – is a piece of wordplay rooted in the British English term “bogey.” That said, American English is shifting to “bogeyman” instead of “boogeyman” – and in the South, the creature is known as the “boogerman.”

More broadly, the show feels constructed for modern American streaming audiences. The episode opens with Doctor explaining the logic of the show to his new companion, Ruby (Millie Gibson). This is a standard Doctor Who convention, a way of easing new viewers into the show. It’s a rich tradition, although one that usually comes at the end of the premiere rather than the start of it, because the story itself is meant to be the attraction rather than the lore.

“Space Babies” just frontloads a whole host of unnecessarily detailed exposition, details that Davies would wait years to introduce during his earlier relaunch. Davies wouldn’t name the Doctor’s home planet as “Gallifrey” or explain that TARDIS is an acronym for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space” until the third season of the revival, but the Doctor just breezes through that information here, like he’s reading the show’s Wikipedia page for the benefit of the audience at home.

It's an approach that feels like it’s designed for what writer Lil Byock described as “second-screen content”, entertainment “where you can be on your phone while it’s on.” It’s incredibly blunt, lacking the artfulness and grace of Davies’ original approach to Doctor Who, where he seduced mainstream audiences with clever stories and big ideas rather than overwhelming them with world-building continuity and trivia. It feels like a pivot in how the show is written.

“Space Babies” is also playing with American science-fiction iconography. In the episode, the Doctor and Ruby visit an abandoned space station now staffed by babies. The logs reveal that the old staff wore uniforms not unlike those featured on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. Indeed, the entire premise of the episode – about a space facility maintained by super-intelligent babies – could feel like it’s inspired by the fact that a lot of Star Trek costumes look quite baby-ish.

However, the episode feels particularly pointed at an American audience in terms of its central metaphor. These children have been left to maintain a space station that grows human babies, because it is against the law to terminate such facilities. “It’s the recession,” explains Jocelyn Sancerre (Golda Rosheuvel). “The government closed the baby station to save money, but the law says it’s illegal to stop the birth machines.”

Ruby articulates the point more explicitly, “So the planet down below refused to stop the babies being born, but once they’re born they refuse to look after them?” Essentially, “Space Babies” is a cynical commentary on abortion politics, on the laws that prevent women from terminating pregnancies while also refusing to support the children those women are forced to bring to term. This is, understandably, a huge issue in the United States right now, even affecting IVF treatments.

However, abortion isn’t really a culture war issue in the United Kingdom. Indeed, it’s notable that “Kill the Moon”, an earlier episode that many American critics engaged with as an abortion metaphor, was never intended as such because it was written by a writer living in Sweden for a show broadcasting in the United Kingdom, two countries where abortion is largely treated as a non-issue. As such, “Space Babies” feels very consciously geared to American audiences.

There’s also some of this tension in the second part of the two-episode premiere, “The Devil’s Chord.” In that adventure, the Doctor and Ruby journey back to Abbey Road in 1963 to watch the Beatles record. However, it also serves as an opportunity for Doctor Who to delve into its own history. As the Doctor points out to Ruby, the events of the show’s very first story – “An Unearthly Child” – are happening on the other side of London at around the same time.

Doctor Who has always been fascinated with British icons. Indeed, the Beatles briefly appeared in a 1960s serial, “The Chase.” However, the show’s conflation of the Beatles and Doctor Who as British pop culture exports feels calculated for an American audience. Indeed, this is a nice bit of synergy for Disney+’s content library. The streaming service has made itself the home of Beatles-centric documentaries like Get Back and Let It Be.

Again, it’s important not to overstate or exaggerate this. Only two episodes of the season have been released to date and it’s not as if any of this material fundamentally alters the character of Doctor Who as a British cultural institution. Still, it’s an interesting illustration of how medium and message often blur. Davies has turned Doctor Who into a streaming show primarily distributed through an American service. It makes sense that the show itself might shift to reflect that.

During his big exposition dump in “Space Babies”, the Doctor tells Ruby that the TARDIS is stuck in the shape of an outdated icon of British culture because its Chameleon Circuit is broken. However, Davies seems to demonstrate that the show itself is still capable of shifting with its perceived audience.