UK science fiction behemoth Doctor Who has been in a fair amount of trouble for a fair number of years, but today seems to mark the final nail in the series’ TARDIS door. Showrunner Russell T. Davies has announced he’s stepping down from the show for a second time, but more significantly this time taking his production company with him. That means 2026’s promised Christmas special definitely isn’t happening, and the cliffhanger of 2025’s much-derided season ending will continue to go unresolved, as the BBC puts the show out to tender.
In summer 2025, a lousy 8-episode season of Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa (blameless in all of this, doing a fine job in the frequently re-cast lead role but let down by the stories the show was telling) came to an end with the time-travelling Doctor yet again dying and regenerating, but this time taking on the form of actor Billie Piper, who had played a long-running assistant character during the eras of Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. It was a bemusing moment for die-hard fans and casual viewers alike, and will now continue to go unexplained for at least another year, if not forever.
The situation for the show is worse even than that. The two most recent runs of the long-running sci-fi show were backed with Disney money, as the Mouse picked up episodes aired since 2005 for its Disney+ streamer and partnered on production of new episodes. But the new output proved so unpopular that what had been intended to be an extended deal was bailed on by Disney, leaving the cash-strapped BBC with nowhere to go. With Russell T. Davies and his Bad Wolf production company jumping ship too, the program is left existing as a title and nothing else.
Gallifraying at the edges
Doctor Who has been through the wringer many a time over its extraordinary 63-year existence. Originally running as a super-cheap and often wondrous in-house BBC production for its first 26 years, it was abandoned in 1989, left fallow until 1996’s disastrous Paul McGann-led TV movie. (Highlight: Eric Roberts’ portrayal of recurring archenemy The Master.) That was supposed to herald a comeback, but went so badly that the show went untouched for another decade, until Russell T. Davies (the creator and writer of Queer As Folk) revived the show in 2005. It was hit and miss, as you’d expect, but featured some truly stunning episodes (“The Girl in the Fireplace” is an exceptional hour of television), but things started to go downhill after RTD left in 2010 and handed the reins over to excellent writer, but pretty poor showrunner, Steven Moffat (the author of said exceptional episode, and the man responsible for the atrocity that was Sherlock). Seven years of declining quality saw Moffat replaced by Chris Chibnall who was even worse (despite being a lovely person), until RTD returned in 2023 to try to save the ship.
It sank.
That brings us to now, over a year since the last episode of Doctor Who aired, and with the Christmas special now official canned. “And so GOODBYE from me to Doctor Who but HELLO to a big new future for the show, as the BBC announces it’s putting the show out to tender,” Davies wrote on Instagram today. Taking a rather optimistic position on a show he’d just ditched, he continued, “As a result, there won’t be a Christmas Special – we only cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for new Doctor Who… but you’ll be waiting for MORE Doctor Who than a one-off. So it’s worth it!”
This means the BBC is looking for a whole new production company willing to co-fund an expensive, SFX-driven show that was drawing in barely two million viewers in the UK toward the end, down a whopping 11 million from its 2008 peak, and now resorting to AMC+ for its international streaming home. Perhaps it’s time for the show to go away for another decade, giving it time to regenerate into something meaningful to a new audience.