We Have Our First Clues About Doctor Who’s Historic Reboot
Can we see into the future?
Doctor Who is in trouble. For a long time, it seemed like the series couldn’t be stopped, but after a controversial partnership with Disney+ and two reboot seasons, there are officially no current plans for the return of the main show — though we are getting a preschool-age animated series, so there’s a silver lining.
But if you’re waiting for Doctor Who as we know it to return, the first clues are starting to emerge. Apparently, there are a number of candidates for Doctor Who’s new home, and they could change the series entirely.
Jed Mercurio has thrown his hat into the ring for a reboot of Doctor Who.
Last month, the BBC officially put Doctor Who out to tender, meaning the company was fielding pitches from production companies for the series’ future. The window for those pitches closed last week, and now we’re starting to hear the rumors of what’s to come. According to Deadline, Jed Mercurio, the showrunner of the long-running BBC crime show Line of Duty, is in the mix with a pitch from his company, Hat Trick Mercurio. Though he’s best known for Line of Duty and similar dramas, he does have experience with sci-fi as he created the 1998 series Invasion: Earth.
But that’s not the only option. Apparently, World Productions, another producer of Line of Duty, is submitting its own pitch, and Scottish production company STV, the producers of crime thriller series Blue Lights and Criminal Record, are also in the mix. Moving the production to Scotland does make some sense — Doctor Who has been based in Wales for over 20 years, as opposed to England itself.
Doctor Who is looking for a new take after two seasons of a reboot in partnership with Disney.
Now that the deadline has passed, all we can learn about where the show will go from here is the list of pitches and options, at least until we get a decision in March 2027. But there are some patterns to note all the same: for example, multiple candidates are known for police procedural shows. The genre isn’t dissimilar to Doctor Who’s alien-of-the-week structure, and police procedurals are similarly often filmed on location, so the process is comparable.
Perhaps we’ll see a more procedural take on Doctor Who in the future, or we’ll see a company rise to the challenge and deliver a new era of the Doctor Who franchise that will stand up against everything from the TV movie to the 60th anniversary specials. Those are some mighty big, time-traveling shoes to fill, but the BBC will have to find someone to fill them.
