One of the fascinating, and possibly unique (in degree, if not in kind) things about Doctor Who fandom has been its overdetermined, and ritualistically invoked constructions of the series’ past and future. I say this as an emphatically die-hard fan myself! I know of no other media fandom, for example, that could have produced anything as elaborate as the In Vision fanzine (1980s-2000s), or that could have kept Doctor Who Magazine going for over 30 years (half of which without any actual television Doctor Who in production!), or that filters every new Doctor, companion, story, and season through the lens of what came before (e.g., the almost unavoidable tendency of long-time fans to substitute past Doctors in their heads while taking in a new one). This fandom, as even this discussion thread indicates, enacts itself through continuous invocation, comparison, attribution, categorization, and so on. Given that Davies, Moffat, and many other key production personnel stem from exactly this fannish background, it’s not surprising that contemporary Doctor Who is in constant dialogue with itself. Like the rest of you, I’m hopeful that Moffat will gently break away from more of the Davies era trappings as the season, and his tenure, goes on.

That said, I do agree that this tendency at the production level is compounded by the branding thrust of 21st century popular media. The BBC today would not abide by the sort of wholesale transition that happened between 1969 and 1970 (and again in 1971, arguably), nor between Seasons 17 and 18. At previous times, the show, and British television, simply functioned differently. In the context of the original times, and from the perspective of the BBC, it spent the 1960s as pleasantly distracting time-filler, the 1970s as popular institution, and the 1980s as a redundant vestige headed for extinction. The timing of the relaunch in the mid 2000s could not have been better for many reasons, but the industrial embrace of fannish consumption is certainly critical.

I do wonder, though, whether Doctor Who even *needs* a radical regeneration at this point, only 4-ish years into the new run. Obviously, there are marketing reasons to change the surface elements of the series, sell more new Dalek toys and green bulbous sonic screwdrivers. But I haven’t seen much that has ever indicated that Moffat didn’t already love what Davies had done with the series — I remember reading/listening to him be downright effusive about the writing on “Smith & Jones,” for instance.

That is, I’m just raising the possibility that while you’re exactly right that the changes and lack of changes feed into merchandising concerns, I’m not certain that their *genesis* was always the merchandising/franchising of Doctor Who. Or, at least, that Moffat saw things he liked about the series that would also sync well with new merchandising opportunities. I don’t buy for a second the “well, we’re changing lots of other things, so why not the Daleks, too!” line from this week’s Doctor Who Confidential, but do think it’s plausible that Moffat wouldn’t want a radical change, say like the UNIT years, because he and Wenger think Doctor Who works better in the traditional format of traveling anywhere, anytime.

I personally would like to see more play with the scheduling of specific episodes — every season has started with an on-Earth, contemporary introduction story followed by a far-flung future episode, then back to the past to meet up with an iconic British figure (at least Churchill’s not a writer, eh?), then the obligatory two-parter, the Doctor-lite episode, another two-parter, and then three arc-y episodes to wrap it up. This format works pretty well, but it’s getting stale, and it’s a little disappointing that it doesn’t seem Moffat’s messing with that yet.

And I would argue that the move from Williams to JNT was far more radical a change in tone than anything yet seen in this production hand-over. Had there been a sense of brand consistency, and franchise identity, in the early 80s then I suspect JNT would have found himself with far less scope to reinvent.

Likewise, the Troughton/Pertwee regeneration also ushers in far more radical format changes, as you note. Again, I’d raise the question of whether such considerable reformatting would even be floated as an idea now. And this is sort of what I’m driving at in my piece: Who has changed far more radically in tone and basic narrative premise in the past than seems to be permissible, or even industrially thinkable, right now. If that is so, what may account for this? My suggestion is that it is, at least in part, a logic of programme branding.

The way in which Amy is introduced is somewhat novel, though, I agree with you. But this still seems to recap prior production logics: Rose was introduced to build and ‘interpellate’ the female audience (she diegetically displaces ‘male fan’ Clive), and young Amelia hails the child audience more directly than at any time since 2005. Each companion appears fairly directly conceptualised as a production ‘solution’ to targeting an audience segment who, it is feared, may fail to embrace the show. Clearly Moffat is telling new stories, in new ways, but I’m suggesting that this diegetic shift is nevertheless underpinned by shared production discourses and logics.

I guess I’m interested in opposing what I’d see as a common (though by no means universal) fan reading of the series, where ‘newness’ is assumed to automatically emerge through a change in production personnel, and through new titles/theme/TARDIS/villains. Rather than reading-for-difference — something also reinforced in promotional paratexts, as I note — I’m primarily interested here in reading the brand critically and somewhat *against* the grain of its discursive logic of ‘refreshment’. I’d like to see Steven Moffat improve on Russell T. Davies’s work too, but Moffat seems rather in thrall to its success and its story-arc formatting at present. Time will tell!

The complete overhauls in each regeneration’s style were rarely immediate, clean breaks with the previous incarnations of the Doctor (with Troughton/Pertwee being a notable exception). It took a series or two before the Tom Baker/Louise Jameson combo got into its classic stride, it took a bit before McCoy began to gain his footing (and then, uh, get cancelled, and they tried to really plan out the Baker/Davison switch ahead of time), etc. I suspect it will be a bit before Matt Smith’s Doctor Who era starts to feel significantly different from the Eccleston/Tennant era.

This is, I’m assuming, somewhat intentional and probably natural for this franchise. The first set of episodes were written before they’d cast the Doctor and got a good sense of Smith (and what his youth might bring to the role), and so they have to rely on the previous approaches to characterizing the Doctor. Additionally, I do look at Moffatt as being a kind of Robert Holmes for the Davies era — he created a great amount of the characterization, mythology (especially related to the 51st century, picking up from Talons of Weng-Chiang), and dialogue bits (“wibbly wobbly timey wimey”) that made the Davies era work. Many of the similarities between Moffatt’s first few episodes and the previous era are because Moffatt was the best, most memorable contributor to the previous era.

I just hope he can manage the longer-form stuff — Jekyll was similarly promising, but ended with a truly terrible final episode, rivaling “The Last of the Time Lords” and “Journey’s End” for overindulgent crappiness. I’m fine with Moffatt marking the Doctor Who franchise as being the same as the successful one that just preceded his, but by the end of the series he’d better improve on his predecessor’s failures.

But, though the Doctor Who franchise element is certainly important, I think we should also consider that the 2005-present series is much more heavily serialized and character-driven than earlier iterations of the show. Thus, there’s much more emphasis on showing the Doctor’s consistencies, and that he has a history that affects his behavior – the Tennant era isn’t forgotten, because this Doctor just ended those experiences. And, the constant alien attacks on Earth are now something that should be in global memory.

Early Doctor Who was a largely episodic show, which allowed for the kinds of unexpectedness of plot and complete overhauls in regenerations – grounding it in characters, and thus eras, has made that less plausible.

First, you state “Doctor Who seemingly can’t do regeneration anymore, or can’t be allowed to.” — well, I don’t see any reason to believe either the assumption that there’s ever been wholescale reinvention of the series (other than perhaps the McGann movie and the beginning of the Davies era) or that this show isn’t doing that, albeit slowly like it’s been done before. Narratively, the show from 1963-1989 rarely changed — certainly the Hinchcliffe era had more gothic horror than other eras, the purely historicals pretty much ended after Hartnell, the changes in the episode format were less a creative choice and more a scheduling necessity, etc.

After The Eleventh Hour, I see plenty of small changes that hint at big changes coming down the road. For the first time I’m aware of, the Doctor’s visited a companion at multiple times in her life, very quickly (a la Girl in the FIreplace) — Moffat’s referred to this as Amy “knowing the Doctor longer than he’s known himself” in the new regeneration, and there are rumors that this might be expanded further in the future with more time jumps in Amy’s life. Leadworth, too, is a novel locale (at least compared to Davies’s tiresome overuse of London), and includes a supporting cast of characters that might resemble the Mickey/Rose dynamic on first glance, but the wedding’s a new twist. But the biggest issue is one raised in Victory of the Daleks that I won’t spoil for non-torrenting American readers here; suffice it to say, Amy’s revelation about what she does and doesn’t know hints that large elements of the Davies era might be slowly dismantled over the series. Certainly The Victory of the Daleks indicates that Moffat’s not shying away from significantly reinventing the series’ major villains, either, something that hasn’t been done in quite a while.

So, I question your assertion that since Doctor Who historically hasn’t been thought of as a franchise, its “regenerations” were perhaps less measured than this. And perhaps that’s true for chunks of the B&W era and any episode Robert Holmes wrote. I see it somewhat differently, however, as the switch from the Williams to the JNT era — the final series of Tom Baker’s run — was entirely about changing the tone and mood of Doctor Who, getting rid of companions, bringing back a recurring villain, and introducing three new youthful companions (not to mention the radically different credit sequence). I see the first Matt Smith series as doing something similar, bridging what Doctor Who was in the previous years to what it will be rather slowly, and reshaping the franchise both visually and narratively to be something new and different to provide obvious new product tie-in opportunities.

Which is, to my mind, the beauty of Doctor Who; it often changes and looks different, but it’s always been the same fundamental show, regardless of if the Doctor says “you lot” or refers to his TARDIS as a “Type 40.” What excites me about the current series is that while the core of the series may remain the same (and should remain the same), there are a growing number of hints that Moffat’s got something truly new he’s working toward up his sleeve.