Doctor Who Contextualized

Doctor Who is a science fiction drama series depicting the adventures of the Doctor, a Time Lord who can travel through time in their TARDIS (“Time and Relative Dimension in Space”) time machine.

“An Unearthly Child” (Coburn et. al.), Doctor Who’s first episode, was created by the BBC and aired on BBC TV in November 1963. It was written into the canon that when the Doctor is mortally wounded, or simply wears out their body, they will regenerate into a different human form, thus allowing the story to continue and a new actor to take over. The series ran for nearly seven hundred episodes over twenty-six series and years before falling out of popularity and was abandoned by the BBC in 1989 (Jeffery, 2019).

The BBC commissioned a reboot of the series (“Rose”, Davies et. al., 2005) with Russel T. Davies and Steven Moffat at the helm – both have a passionate history as fans of the series (Winterson, 2014; Eric, 2016) and the new series “generated significant economic value for the UK by exporting the best of British content and creativity to international audiences” (BBC, 2023, p. 6), quickly becoming one of the BBC’s largest and most profitable intellectual properties (Gibson, 2008).

Some of the earliest examples of media convergence, specifically transmedia storytelling, are found within the history of Doctor Who. Henry Jenkins defines transmedia storytelling as “Stories that unfold across multiple media platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the world, a more integrated approach to franchise development models based on urtexts and ancillary products” (2006, p. 293) and Doctor Who “embraces convergence culture on an unprecedented scale . . . and what was once regarded as an embarrassment to [the BBC] now spans the media landscape as a multi-format colossus” (Perryman, 2008, p. 21).

This series will now explore Perryman’s article and the use of transmedia storytelling in Doctor Who, and examine the recent partnership between the BBC and Disney in producing the “Whoniverse” (Doctor Who, 2023) to highlight the possible ways in which transmedia storytelling has been used by Disney through Star Wars and to see if this is an indication on how Doctor Who will be produced moving forward with the BBC and Disney partnership.