When you think about it, ‘Doctor Who’ should really have ended in 1966. After all, the star of the series was involved in protracted and angry disputes with the show’s producer, and was also suffering from the first visible symptoms of the arteriosclerosis that would take his life less than a decade later. Sure, the show was doing well in the ratings, but it’s pretty rare that success like that survives replacing the star of the show. Admittedly, ‘Doctor Who’ had already replaced its entire supporting cast at least twice by the time Hartnell finally left, with no apparent loss of support (primarily due to strong viewing support for the Doctor’s recurring antagonists, the Daleks–it’s no coincidence that Troughton’s first outing was against the iconic pepperpots)…but really, there was no reason to ever believe that recasting the Doctor was going to work.
Especially because it was written into the series. The show has been around for almost fifty years now, and is on its eleventh actor to “officially” play the part; as a result, we’ve become so accustomed to regeneration as a concept that we’ve almost forgotten what an extraordinary handwave it is. “Oh, yes, I just changed my entire physical appearance and personality. We aliens do that every so often. Weird, huh?” (Speaking of things that are no coincidence, it’s only after regeneration is introduced that the Doctor’s alien physiology becomes a serious plot point. Hartnell’s “alien-ness” was primarily a matter of attitude, a cultural identity; with Troughton and afterwards, he becomes an alien with unusual racial abilities.)
What’s striking about this is that when you look at most of the American cult series who’ve taken a run at the Doctor’s longevity (…well, “taken a run” is putting it generously. The only shows to really come close would be ‘Stargate’ and ‘Star Trek’, and that’s if you decided to treat every single one of their spin-offs and relaunches as a single show. But we’ll consider anything that ran more than three seasons, the point at which ‘Doctor Who’ was forced to retool to account for Hartnell’s absence…) It’s amazing how many of them are set up better than ‘Doctor Who’ was to continue without their stars. All of the ‘Trek’ series are ensemble shows built around the crew of a Starfleet vessel; they even tease us, in the Season 3 finale of ‘Next Generation’, with the idea that Picard might be pensioned out/killed off as a result of the Borg crisis and Riker might become the captain. Such a thing would have been audacious, but would it really have been any more daring than replacing a 58-year old grandfatherly inventor with a 46-year old cosmic tramp?
‘The X-Files’ actually did make use of its series format to replace one actor with another, but only late in the series run and only out of necessity. It’s worth asking if they could have extended the show by making the switch sooner and getting the audience used to the idea that nobody was safe from the sinister conspiracy, or whether it would have gotten the series canceled that much quicker as fans who were really watching for the emotional dynamic between Mulder and Scully gave up on the show.
And ‘Buffy’ actually introduced first one, then a second, then a whole friggin’ raft of potential replacements, only to have them all serve as foils for the lead character and demonstrate, in one fashion or another, that Buffy Summers is special even among special people. Certainly, you could argue that the show was about Buffy in specific and not about Slayers in general, and that the creators weren’t interested in extending the show just for the sake of extending it…then again, you could also argue that the show was about transitioning from teenager to adult through making the metaphorical high school experiences into literal confrontations with the forces of evil, and the creators certainly seemed to be interested in extending that show just for the sake of extending it.
Even a series like ‘Heroes’, which was explicitly designed to have a sprawling, ever-changing cast, had problems adding people to it in later seasons…then again, it seems like the later seasons had a lot of problems beyond just “adding new characters that caught the audience’s interest.” But ‘Heroes’ does provide a particularly illuminating example of the problem that cult shows have when they try to outlast their actors, and the reason that ‘Who’ is not in much company as it heads to the 32-odd season mark.
Namely, that series don’t like changing their core dynamic, and do so only a) grudgingly, b) out of necessity, and as a result c) through desperation and not design. The concept of Agent Doggett was, at its heart, “Oh shit David Duchovny just served us walking papers what are we gonna do now?” The dynamic of Season Six of ‘Buffy’ was less, “Let’s do a meaningful and sensitive arc about how Buffy will cope without adult mentor-figures,” and more, “Um…Tony Head wants to go back to England. How do we work with that?” The actors who came in for the later seasons of ‘Heroes’ were working with a plot arc that was already flailing around for relevance, and were cast by producers who were trying to cast new roles while managing the day-to-day production of a complex series. These changes were reluctant, and frequently rushed.
Whereas ‘Doctor Who’, by this point, had already (as previously mentioned) changed its entire cast twice. The producers were very comfortable creating new characters to travel in the TARDIS, and the show’s format had shown that it could adapt to such changes. Recasting the Doctor was just the final step in a process that had begun with ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, a process that showed that the concept, not the ensemble, was the star of the show. In that light, it’s not too surprising that the show made it through the transition with barely a bump.
Which makes the transition to the UNIT era, with ‘Spearhead From Space’, even more surprising. But that’s a discussion for later…
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Interesting, but I think you may be missing a key point here, which is confusing the actor’s importance in the show vs the role’s inportance in the show: Robert Patrick came on as Doggett, not Mulder. The alternate slayers would replace Buffy, not just Sarah Michelle Gellar. In the case of the Doctor, the new actors replace the older actors, but they play the same role.
So, replacing Gellar and Buffy with say Dushku and Faith, or Duchovny and Mulder with Patrick and Doggett is quite different to replacing Hartnell for Troughton yet keeping the Doctor. It’s much more like James Bond which has lasted just as long.
I would agree, however, that it is remarkable how well the switchover worked, and it is, I suppose, flabbergasting when you consider that it endures almost 50 years later. I would just point out that I think your comparative examples rest on a confusion as to what is being replaced and what is remaining the same in this cast/premise shake-ups.
ESPN Sportscenter strikes me as the only American show to handle cast changes as well as Doctor Who. Of course, it’s nonfiction.
Bewitched switched Darrens, and no one noticed or cared. Also, Roseanne switched the actress playing Becky, and then switched back.
So Bass might be onto something.
But, I do think switching Doctors is akin to bringing in a whole new character — the role they play is often very, very different from their predecessor.
That’s one of the things I actually like about Doctor Who. If you don’t like one Doctor, you might like the previous one or the next one.
For example, while I loved David Tennant, he started to grate on me towards the end. He was becoming more cartoonish and his Shakespearean background was coming out more and more (likely because he was preparing for Hamlet around the same time). He became more…theatrical. And it just bugged me. Best example of when I realized this was, funny enough, his last episode, when he shouted “SO MUCH MORE!”
By that point, you better believe I welcomed Matt Smith with open arms. And now, he’s become one of my favourite iterations of The Doctor.
I should also mention that Star Trek KIND OF did something major in the first season of Next Generation: they killed of Tasha Yar.
For American television, to kill off a main part of the cast so early in was a huge shock. Which, when they teased Picard/Locutus, you could actually buy it because they’d already killed off one character, what’s to stop them from doing it again? In retrospect, if it were me, I would’ve kept Locutus as a major foil longer than the 2-parter.
Well, a big part of it is that they got lucky and “traded up” to a better Doctor(yes, I know Hartnell has his supporters, but Troughton is pretty much universally regarded as an improvement).If you do the switcheroo right the FIRST time, fans will be more willing to give you a chance to win them over NEXT time, too.
Indeed, the James Bond comparison is instructive:When the transition to Lazenby didn’t work out, the producers felt obliged to bring Connery back (albeit temporarily) rather than go directly to another New Bond; and when they HAD to recast again, they went with someone already known for a similiar role on TV, thus reassuring audiences that the change wouldn’t be TOO radical.
However intentional it was, the revived WHO probably benefitted from doing it’s first regeneration early on; it got modern audiences used to the idea before they’d become TOO invested in one specific actor in the role.
Indeed, I’m convinced the major reason Colin Baker was so poorly recieved was because the TRANSITION was botched so thoroughly it used up all the fan’s faith in the producers. (A bit of a feat, as Davison’s departure- including the ACTUAL first appearance of Baker- is one of the highlights of the show’s entire history).
Of course, that outfit was the deal-breaker.
I think “barely a bump” is a bit of an exaggeration. While it’s true that Troughton was accepted as the Doctor by a good number of people, there’s also ample evidence from the BBC audience reports that his first half season was considered to be rough. And, of course, by 1968-1969, the show was a ratings disaster in danger of cancellation. The real miracle is that Doctor Who survived 1969 to become the monster hit it was during the Pertwee years, which only happened because of Derek Sherwin’s complete retooling of the core concept of the show.
But yeah, the “changing face”/”renewal”/”regeneration” ideas are pretty amazing!
@Bass: My counter-argument would be that Troughton didn’t play the role like Hartnell. The difference between the First and Second Doctor is actually bigger, to my mind, than the difference between (to pick an example I didn’t use) Doctors Crusher and Pulaski.
(Actually, ThatNickGuy, that probably answers your point. The Pulaski switch went so badly that it probably made the series gunshy about any cast changes.)
So while it was a recast and not a replacement, the characters in the series treated it like it was a replacement.
Gustopher also mentioned that point, John; that Troughton’s Doctor is so different from Hartnell’s that they’re like different characters.
But I don’t think that holds water. I think the real *joy* of the regenerations is that it is the *same* character in an ongoing narrative.
I mean, compare the multitude of Doctors to James Bonds. Bond has had many actors play him but they’re kind of ‘jump on, jump off’ points. They’re all Bond, but different takes on Bond, much in the same way different actors play Batman or (now) Kirk. But the Doctor is different; Matt Smith is playing *the same character*. Matt Smith isn’t playing a different interpretation of the Doctor, he’s not playing a reboot or a reimagining, he’s playing the exact same guy that Hartnell played.
In THE ELEVENTH HOUR, the joy of DOCTOR WHO continuity is that when he asks the Atraxi, “Is this world protected?” we see the previous 10 faces and we know they’re all the same person. Far from the different quirks making the Doctor feel like a new character, isn’t the fun of it that this new, odd Doctor is the exact *same* Doctor? Don’t the new quirks only point out stronger the contradiction it’s the same man, rather than actually distance them from one another?
I can understand that each take on the is different, but I think the fact it’s the exact same person, changing faces in an unbroken chain, gives it a fundamentally different quality than the other examples such as Pulaski/Crusher, Doggett/Mulder, LAW & ORDER, James Bond, Batman, etc.
I don’t argue that it’s longevity is surprising, only that I think the comparisons you’re making are somewhat inaccurate; it would make more sense to draw comparisons with something like the original Spider-Man. They both debuted in 1963, and both to this day are in a continuous story despite an enormous amount of upheaval behind the scenes, but the Spider-Man of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN comic, despite no one that’s working on it was working on it in his inception, is the same Spider-Man that failed to stop a mugger in AMAZING FANTASY #15. And it might be interesting to note that Spidey has had an enormous number of reboots and reimaginings in TV, film, and even comics, whereas DOCTOR WHO has had very little. This may be due to the comics being less widespread than TV and thus, it’s easier to reboot Spidey in different mediums as his originating medium is so small in its audience, whereas DOCTOR WHO is a TV show and so it original incarnation is already it’s most widespread version.
I just think that if DOCTOR WHO’s longevity is surprising, arguing it’s surprising it succeeded where so many shows similar to it failed (or didn’t last as long) doesn’t really work if the nature of the shows is different.
Surprised Law and Order was only mentioned once in all the replies and not once in the article. I mean it was gradual but no one who started on Law & Order was there by the end. The show kept moving in essentially the same format but perhaps in that case the cast wasn’t as important as the storyline from week to week. But then maybe Doctor Who is similar to that. It isn’t as much as seeing The Doctor as it is seeing his challenges. Like the Daleks.
Troughton was a better choice than they could have guessed. Two of his top rivals for the role were Michael Hordern and Patrick Wymark. Hordern was a great actor but old enough and lanky enough that the producers would have been tempted to make him Hartnell 2, which would have been disastrous. Wymark died of a heart attack in 1970, so if he had been the 2nd Doctor the whole idea of multi-Doctor stories might never have been.
@Tarpo
There’s a whole raft of shows with fictional plots that continued for decades, but all of the comparative examples in this article are some form of science fiction or fantasy. Along with no mention of Law and Order, there is no mention of long running soap operas.
Whether that was an intended exclusion or not, I don’t know.
Maybe the British are just more flexible in some way. _The Avengers_ started out as a show about a doctor avenging the death of his fiance. Steed was originally a sidekick to the doctor. The doctor quit, leaving Steed as the main character. Over the next few years, he acquired a series of his own sidekicks, for the third and fourth seasons working with Cathy Gale (rowr) then hitting gold with Emma Peel (Rowr!) as his full partner.
Along the way the show went from a fairly straightforward crime drama to fantastic crime to at least one literal comic book villain, to parody and then self-parody. Oh, and eventually to another sidekick for Steed.
There was a short-lived second series. There was no movie. (No, there wasn’t! You can’t make me!)
Ugh. I HATED Pulaski. Why did she replace Crusher, anyway? Behind the scenes, I mean. Bah, never mind, I’ll look it up on the Star Trek wiki.
@Bass
What you say is true on one level. The Doctor retains his memories and the core principles of his character (i.e. “Never cruel or cowardly”), he refers to things his past bodies have done in the first person, etc.
On the level of what the audience sees and hears, though, the Doctor becomes a substantially different character every few years. Usually there’s a serial or episode where the new Doctor has to figure out who he is now. So viewers are treated to the sage and authoritative Pertwee becoming the kooky and rebellious Baker, or the other Baker openly insulting his predecessor Davison. (Onscreen, that is. The actors were a mutual admiration society.) For viewers to treat this as an ongoing narrative with a single hero with many faces is an act of faith, really.
This is a little easy to forget in the present, because the physical differences between David Tennant and Matt Smith are minimal, and the behavioral differences are subtle. You could very easily ignore the regeneration and assume that the Doctor has been recast and reassessed his life. But the trust the fans have for the show allows them to go a little further out there when it’s time for the Twelfth Doctor to take the stage.
Refering to Stickmaker’s AVENGERS analogy: When the original series was cancelled at the end of the ’60’s, we narrowly missed the show’s biggest transition: had it returned for another season at that time, it would have been without Patrick Macnee, who had already decided to take a break.(The idea of THE AVENGERS without Steed is inconcievable at this point, but it would have been interesting to see what they would have done.) I’m a defender of THE NEW AVENGERS (well, the first season, anyway), and would love to have seen the unmade AVENGERS INTERNATIONAL (an attempted 1980’s revival that would have featured an ensemble cast headed by Macnee playing Steed as the new “Mother”… and an assistant named Miss Peel, who would have been the daughter of Mrs. Peel and OF COURSE HER HUSBAND MR. PEEL, NO AMBIGUITY ABOUT HER PARENTAGE AT ALL, I ASSURE YOU).
Of course, the REAL star of THE AVENGERS was always head writer/producer Brian Clemens, which is why the first thing that went wrong with that movie was the studio squeezing him out of the picture.
Surprised nobody has mentioned M*A*S*H
Granted, Hawkeye stayed, but his tentmates and commander came and went.
Mystery Science Theater 3000
The creator left after 4 and a half seasons, and the show went on for a further 5 and a half, plus a movie. By the end of the run, like Law & Order, there wasn’t a single original cast member on the show. Though two of the characters remained the same, the rest had been replaced. Why? Probably because the core concept behind the show carried on, and it wasn’t totally character driven. That may be a cheat, but …
I think it helps that Doctor Who has such a small main cast. When you only have two or three characters, you can swap one of them out every year or two and achieve full turnover pretty quickly. With a Star Trek-sized ensemble, you’d either have to swap them out a lot faster than that (at which point you have less time for any story that’s not related to the casting changes — witness the way season 7 of DS9 turned into the Ezri Dax show) or any given character is going to be around for a decade or so (at which point they start to feel like a fixture and swapping them out for storytelling reasons becomes a lot harder).
It has been observed that with American / Hollywood type TV programs, for a show conceived of as an ensemble show to succeed it soon becomes a star show(FAMILY MATTERS / Urkel) while a star show soon becomes an ensemble show(THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW)
As many have said, it was one Doctor with many actors and the brilliant device of regeneration. The show itself has been flexible, changing with the times and evolving in level of special effects. It was, however, off the air for over ten years (with one TV movie in between) and in that way more resembles Star Trek and TNG. If Russell T Davies hadn’t been a fan, and a very talented producer, there wouldn’t be this article.
It’s interesting to consider to what extent the various Doctors are the same/different. This is one of the only shows to play with the idea of a character who is stable but also changing, which, it turns out, is a rewarding approach.
The idea of a ‘core’ identity who has periodic changes to his personality and appearance is pretty interesting – it’s a bug, not a feature. It makes it easier for fans to imagine themselves as the Doctor, for one thing (after all, who knows who else the Doctor could be?). And it gets at interesting philosophical issues about what’s really fundamental to identity. The Doctor always has to be altruistic, anti-authority, hyper-intelligent, and quirky. (Let’s forget the Valeyard for now). So one can view other aspects as less crucial to the person – whether he’s funny or snarky or Northern. And that’s kind of the way real people are: we are different at different times and in different moods, but still somehow ourselves.
Most tv/movies present characters that are less variable than in real life. Bizarrely, the regenerating alien is more realistic. Trying to work out what parts of the Doctor are fundamental is intriguing because that’s what we do all the time when trying to figure out other people.
Trivia: The New Avengers does some entertaining location work in Toronto toward the end of its run. Well, entertaining if you like vintage location-spotting.
I thought the mission statement of Buffy S6 was “Marti Noxon has an extraordinarily thin skin so let’s beat up on some asshole nerds for 20 episodes.”