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Well, let's have a little look at that, shall we? I've never followed "Doctor Who" but I have been vaguely familiar with it. A superfan, who's also gay, got the gig as writer/showrunner (Russell T. Davies) from 2005-2010. He also created the spinoff "Torchwood" which was the "grown-up series Who couldn't be" (mainly everyone was gay or bi, was the big change there) which never rose to the same heights of popularity, and has now come back to try and make the show popular again after the era of the Female Doctor tanked it (turns out there is not a massive audience for making such huge revisions to an established character).
"Who" is a show that suffers from the problem of being perceived as a 'kid's show' so there's not too much they can do there to change it, and any changes that have been made since 2005 to now treat "adult" as meaning "we talk about sex and everyone is gay".
Davies started this, but wasn't responsible for the worst of it because at least he is a fan, and stuck with popular characters for the second spin-off "The Sarah Jane Adventures". But even then we got the Doctor having an ex-wife, lectures about black people in Britain, and the rest of the progressive push leading up to the Female Doctor in 2017/18 (well after Davies had left).
Now, if I believe what I'm reading online, even with Davies back, they had to bring back one of the new popular Doctors of his era - David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, now the Fourteenth (even though all this makes nonsense of former canon that there could only be thirteen incarnations). And this is how we get the new Fifteenth Doctor who is black - a completely new process invented whereby the next regeneration splits into two separate beings.
The new actor is also gay (I'm presuming, from the description "the first openly queer actor to lead the series"). Since they've given previous Doctors romantic partners in the new revision, are we going to see the first gay Doctor Who?
Possibly, but who cares? Davies managed to revitalise the series, but also set it on the path to "we must have the first sexually active, first female, first whatever" revision of the character, as well as the lectures about black representation, colonialism, and the rest of it. The success of all that is that the show slumped again, until they had to bring back a popular, white, straight, conventional Doctor to lead into the new black queer Doctor. The hopes there are that instead of going straight from the female Doctor to the black one, and continuing to shed viewership, they can hook viewers coming back to see the return of Ten and keep them when Fifteen is on the scene.
My point out of all this rambling? That when your audiences are mainly white, and straight, and cis, then promoting lead characters on the basis of minority status is marking the show out as "oh it's for the LGBT+ crowd, not me" and you lose viewers and then you lose money.
There's a difference between "the return of a popular show and this time the lead happens to be X" and blaring "the return of a popular show where the whole point is that the lead is X!" I'll be interested to see how the new Doctor turns out, but if the show is going to be all "Did you know he's black this time? Yes, the first black Gallifreyan (if he is, I have no idea on that) and certainly the first black Doctor, he's black you know, we're going to have all sorts of lectures about black people and colonisation" then they're going to shed viewers like leaves in autumn, and then of course it will be blamed on racism and homophobia.
To put some numbers on these claims, UK ratings for the 2022 specials were the worst in the show's history, not even taking population growth into account: https://guide.doctorwhonews.net/info.php
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I was forced to watch the three recent special episodes with David Tennant back (absolutely the best doctor of the reincarnated version of the show) because of friends and was surprised just how much the quality had dropped since his original series with Rose Tyler. No 15. did seem cool though from the last few minutes of the last special episode (the plot of the last third of this episode was really stupid though), not cool enough to make me watch the show again, but definitely better than Whittaker.
Personally I think it's a terrible decision; if they're going to muck about with regeneration so that we get "bigeneration" and splitting into a black and a white Doctor (oh man, just typing that out makes me wince), then why not have the post-female doctor regeneration be a reset to a former version, i.e. Ten? They're already making this a Special Special regeneration, why not set it up as "uh, this has only happened very rarely and when it does then it's unstable" and that sets up for the Special Special Special bigeneration.
When a show does a return of fan favourite character, it's because they need eyeballs desperately. I appreciate Davies does love the show, but I think him being gay means he did and does want "representation" for personal reasons (and not just ticking off the DEI boxes), and when you are in a position to get your own fanfic done as canon, that leads down very winding paths.
You're thinking too small. Davies has hinted that this split regeneration has retroactively applied to every previous Doctor as well. So that they all now exist, simultaneously within their own time line, creating the Doctorverse, such that they can now have multiple Doctor's having multiple adventures at the same time. In other words this is the multiverse for Doctor Who.
Primarily this appears to be away to be able to monetize Dr Who more heavily, outside of just the rare crossovers due to the time line shenanigans they used to use as an excuse for why it didn't happen more frequently. That this happens just as Disney pump a whole bunch of money into the franchise is probably not a coincidence I would suggest.
Yeah, that's the kind of fanon retconning I meant. He's Officially In Charge now, which means he can set what the new canon is, even if it contradicts what has previously been established. The awful movie, where they decided that the Doctor was half-human, is quietly ignored. Can't do that when it's the television show.
They've done it to Trek, they've done it to Star Wars, and now they're doing it to the Doctor.
Interestingly he is also trying to reverse a retcon that was brought in while he wasn't in charge (The Timeless Child) by showing it was essentially an in universe retcon, the Master and Toymaker have rewritten the Doctors past. So trying to remystify his real origin.
To be fair original Doctor Who was always very blase with continuity and rules, so I can't really say even as a 7th Doctor fan, that it has got much worse in that regard. Famously they didn't have canon, just deciding on what was needed for each story to work (including regeneration itself) .
I believe "just deciding on what was needed for each story to work" is a central pillar of most western versions of Buddhism.
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I hereby petition to repeal the 8th, so we can render just punishment to the next screenwriter that tries to do anything involving a multiverse.
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Frankly, trying to appeal to the female fans of Doctor Who by making the Doctor a woman strikes me as about as wrongheaded as would trying to appeal to the male fans of, say, Tomb Raider by making the next game star "Lars Croft". A basic point seems to have been missed somewhere.
I mean if there were 20 different individual 'Tomb Raiders' across a series spanning 60 years of production, I don't think it would be crazy to have one of those 20 be 'Lars Croft' for one game. Could be fun.
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We've had Time Ladies before, there's no reason they couldn't have introduced a new one to be a co-lead with the Doctor. But things like River Song just turned me off, and I'm not anything near a hardcore Whovian. Oh, the Doctor was married? Well, presumably, since the very first Doctor had a grand daughter, but we really don't need to have the Doctor and his love life on show. That's not what the show is about, even if it did start off with the excuse of being "oh it's educational for the children, it will teach them about history because of the Doctor time-travelling". All the lectures about woke issues and 'we must have a female Doctor' (why?) just made it boring.
Well...
>"More girls than boys (under-16s) watched Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who debut - 378,000 v 339,000," Parker wrote. "Last year's series opener: 143,000 girls / 390,000 boys.".
Looks like a 13% increase in overall viewership plus major capture of a new demographic, opening the door to new advertisers and new types of merchandising.
'Never attribute to ideology that which is adequately explained by capitalism.'
Girls and SF is one of those perennial questions. For a long time, it was considered a boys' and men's playground, and women were scarce on the ground indeed. Then we got a lot of good female writers. Then SJW came along and well, you know the fall out of that, plus the Hugos débacle, culminating now in the perceived necessity that you have to be female, LGBT+ or ethnic minority to have any chance of winning one of the awards.
How many of those girls will stick with SF? Hard to say. I think there have always been girls interested in the field, but how many will keep watching Who after the female Doctor is gone?
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