We’ve got a long time to wait—basically the rest of this year—to keep wondering just how badly things went for Doctor Who last year, which means there are plenty of opportunities for people to chime in and ruminate on just why things went wrong. It’s not, however, every day that a former Doctor is the one chiming in.
Recently Peter Capaldi, who played the 12th incarnation of the Time Lord, spoke to British newspaper the Mirror about why Doctor Who has faltered and gave a pretty diplomatic, but interesting, perspective on it: Doctor Who, the brand, became too important at the expense of Doctor Who as a cultural entity, and chasing the former robbed the latter of some of its charms.
“The show became very, very big. And it was never like that when I loved it. So it became a different thing. I think the responsibilities of playing the part became more,” Capaldi said. “There were more of them, there were more things that you had to do rather than just, I mean, I think in the old days, you know, if you were John Pertwee or Tom Baker or something like that, you probably, you know, you spend most of your year making it and then a bit of your year promoting it. But it wasn’t this in-your-face kind of thing that suddenly was really important to the BBC, or suddenly really important to a brand that had to be maintained.”
Of course, by the time that Capaldi was playing the Doctor, the show had become very important to the BBC—after all, his casting was announced not by press release, but by a televised live stage show event. But the bigger the show became as a franchise, the more that overshadowed Doctor Who‘s staying power as a somewhat quaint but still enduring British cultural institution.
“It was just a show that some kids really loved and other kids didn’t care about, but wanted to watch football or you grew out of, you know,” Capaldi continued. “It became this sort of very important thing. I think less in a cultural way and more in an economic way. I think the show is a little bit of a victim of its success. You know, the show that I loved was a tiny thing, a little small thing that survived. It just survived, but nobody knew that it was warming its way into the culture in such a deep way. And I think that’s what I have an affinity with.”
It’s a fair argument to make in the wake of the embarrassing dissolution of the BBC’s partnership with Disney—arguably the entertainment industry face of fully armed and operational franchising models—not just for the huge influx of money the House of Mouse funnelled into two seasons of the show (and one terrible spinoff that, given how badly the relationship broke down, has actually yet to be released by Disney outside of the UK), but for how much that deal, and the desire to create a “Whoniverse” of Doctor Who media, put the show in a position where failure would lead to the disastrous outcome we saw unfold in 2025.
It’s not that Doctor Who can’t be allowed to have a high budget (even if being a little cheap-looking is, indeed, part of the charm), but that Doctor Who works best when it is not so fundamentally beholden to corporate masters and the whims of a kind of brand importance that doesn’t necessarily focus on the show itself. As the BBC begins to pave a way back to the show having a future beyond Christmas 2026, maybe it’ll stick with making it on its own instead of trying something similar to the Disney deal again.
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