10 Doctor Who Characters Who Nearly Got Their Own Spin Off

5. The US Remake

It's basically a given fact within the industry that there will be at least one attempt to remake every and any popular UK show for the US market and this is a formidable fate that almost fell upon Doctor Who back in the 90s. Don't hold it against them, though. It was a different time. Besides, the greatest sci-fi series in the world had shamefully been off screens since the end of the last decade at this point so the Time Lord's return was already long overdue. Surely it was only a matter of time until another rival network approached the BBC to relinquish the rights to the TARDIS and it's widely cited that Fox wanted to launch their own Doctor Who reboot with the intention of making it more appealing for an American audience. Their plans ultimately fell through and it eventually became the 1996 film starring Paul McGann. While the TV movie was a direct continuation of the show's pre-established mythology, rather than a literal reboot, it's interesting to think that it could have been very, very different indeed had the powers of be opted to go another way. Fox apparently wanted to rewrite its entire history by establishing Paul as the First Doctor but something tells us that wouldn't have gone down particularly well amongst the show's legion of dedicated devotees. After all, you don't just rewrite Doctor Who history, unless your name happens to be Steven Moffat, and even then it's frowned upon. At least the Moff has affirmed that there will never be an American reboot so that's something that everybody can agree to thank him for. Just look what happened to Torchwood...