Merrick here...
At the MediaGuardian Edinburgh TV Festival 2010, DOCTOR WHO overlord Steven Moffat discussed the upcoming wave of DOCTOR WHO episodes. Most of us assumed they would follow the show's previously established 13 episode "series" structure (making the forthcoming episodes Series 6 - i.e. "Season 6"). This, however, turns out to be incorrect. The forthcoming 13 episodes will actually comprise Series 6 and 7.
Seems each of these seasons will each be roughly half the length of DW's traditional 13 episode run, and bridged by what's being touted as a whopper of a cliffhanger.
The entirety of this video discussion with Moffatt can be found HERE, but I've transcribed his pertinent comments below...
"DOCTOR WHO will come back for seven episode at Easter, builds to an earth shattering climax at Episode 7, there will be a huge cliffhanger...a cliffhanger we could never do normally at the end of a series of DOCTOR WHO...because it would be too long until it came back...an enormous< honestly game changing cliffhanger for The Doctor and May and Rory - it'll change everything for them. In order to give you time to recover, we'll let you go off...have your Summer Holidays...and come back in the Autumn for what will be another six episodes. For what will be, in fact, Series 7 I suppose. The wrong expression would be to say we're splitting it...we're making, actually, two separate series."
The show's fifth (and most recent season) will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray in early November here in the States and is already up for pre-order HERE
. Seasons 1-4 of the show, covering Doctors Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant, should be findable through the same link - but are also streaming through Netflix.
I personally know many people who are resisting taking a look at this show (i.e. the 2005 shows on up), having pre-judged that it's no different than its often awkward and frequently under produced "classic" progenitor. That's an understandable misgiving, and one I used to share. But several friends...whose opinions I trust...pretty much pressured me into taking a look at the new series. I found Eccleston's episodes promising but felt they never truly achieved what they were striving for. The Tennant episodes, however, are often wildly immiganitive, dramatically affecting, conceptually bold, comedically brilliant, and sometimes amazingly executed (a sequence in which the Doctor's TARDIS chases a car down a busy freeway - I broad daylight- dodging and swaying between cars - is a damn fine by any series' standards).
If you're one of these doubters and haven't done so yet, take a look at this and give it a while to settle in. You may be surprised by what you find - even at its weakest, it's one of the...if not the...most solid genre shows on TV right now. And, given its emphasis on bold characterization and its smart tweaking of absurd conceits into sometimes potent drama, it's likely to hold that mantle for a quite while.
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. Seasons 1-4 of the show, covering Doctors Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant, should be findable through the same link - but are also streaming through Netflix.
I personally know many people who are resisting taking a look at this show (i.e. the 2005 shows on up), having pre-judged that it's no different than its often awkward and frequently under produced "classic" progenitor. That's an understandable misgiving, and one I used to share. But several friends...whose opinions I trust...pretty much pressured me into taking a look at the new series. I found Eccleston's episodes promising but felt they never truly achieved what they were striving for. The Tennant episodes, however, are often wildly immiganitive, dramatically affecting, conceptually bold, comedically brilliant, and sometimes amazingly executed (a sequence in which the Doctor's TARDIS chases a car down a busy freeway - I broad daylight- dodging and swaying between cars - is a damn fine by any series' standards).
If you're one of these doubters and haven't done so yet, take a look at this and give it a while to settle in. You may be surprised by what you find - even at its weakest, it's one of the...if not the...most solid genre shows on TV right now. And, given its emphasis on bold characterization and its smart tweaking of absurd conceits into sometimes potent drama, it's likely to hold that mantle for a quite while.
--- Follow Merrick on Twitter! ---
