Posted in: BBC, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: doctor who

Doctor Who: Is "Weaponised Nostalgia" Killing the Long-Running Series?

Is "weaponised nostalgia" (as writer/actor Mark Gatiss called it) hurting Doctor Who's efforts to find a modern audience? Some thoughts...

Back in June, we shared a four-step plan for getting Doctor Who back on track and opening the long-running series to a new generation of viewers. One of the points we addressed was that maybe it was time to consider a "hard reboot." Much like what we're seeing with Marvel Studios' MCU and the "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" universes, nostalgia and treating canon as gospel can be a deadly combination when it comes to wanting to bring aboard a younger generation of fans. You can't have the Doctor sneeze in 2025 without a thousand folks on social media pointing out how that sneeze contradicts what Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor said about Time Lords and sneezing. And then there's the "it was so much better back in my day" factor, where every generation sees what they grew up with as great and writes off everything after as "not as good as it used to be."

A hard reboot would give the show a chance to start forging its own path moving forward. We're not saying necessarily to wipe clean everything that came before it, but there are a lot of creative folks out there who could find a way to bundle it all up nicely into a ball and put it off to the side (out of sight, out of mind). From there, we get a two-episode special resolving the Billie Piper issue before moving forward with a new Doctor and companion(s). Then, it's nothing but single or two-episode adventures that live up to the possibilities that having a TARDIS offers for a serious stretch of time before even considering diving back into any overarching mythology.

Mark Gatiss (Bookish) recently shared his thoughts on nostalgia and how it can be an obstacle to a show looking to attract a younger, modern audience. The writer and actor penned nine episodes of the series and also appeared in front of the camera. "The actual process of trying to make it a modern show for a new audience is not about nostalgia, and I think that's the great difference," Gatiss shared during an episode of the video interview series The Radio Times Writers' Room, explaining how he approached his work on the series from a here-and-now perspective.

"You have to go, 'Right, why is this going to work now? It doesn't really matter what worked for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker; it's about now. So if we're trying to get an audience now, this show is the same, but different.' So, to me, it was always a combination of those things," he explained. "It's a strange thing, because I've revived so many things, but I think nostalgia is a great enemy, and we have to all be careful of it. It's part of the reason we're in the mess we are, I think – weaponised nostalgia. 'Nothing's as good as it used to be,' and yet people can't see that people have always thought that, even when it used to be better. It's a dangerous thing.

To drive home his feelings on the matter, Gatiss brought up a Doctor Who novel for Virgin Books that he wrote about nostalgia taking on the form of an alien that feasts on memory. "Because it's funny, I keep coming back to that, because as much as I love old stuff, the job of the show constantly is to regenerate itself," he added. "And sometimes when I meet grumpy old 'Doctor Who' fans, you think, 'You've just fallen into the same space time trap, that it's not as good as it used to be, because it's not for you anymore. If you still like it, that's great. It's great, but it's not for you.'"

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