10 Doctor Who Real Life Alternate Timelines

8. What If The 1996 TV Movie Had Gone To Series?

To some people, the idea that the 1996 TV movie could have gone to series is frightening enough. But even more frightening, if it had gone to series, perhaps we'd have had no 2005 series at all. The main reason why the backdoor pilot didn't get picked up was it aired opposite the Roseanne finale, and as disappointing and dumb as that finale was, it still pulled in all the viewers that Tuesday night. Let's imagine the Roseanne finale had aired another time, and somehow a TV movie based on a British television series which most Americans felt was the province of PBS geeks and nerds was the ratings hit that Fox needed it to be to commit to making a series. For one thing, British fans still have trouble with what they see as 'Americanisms' in the movie, and there would be far more in a series. For another, while the '90s was a fertile period for TV science fiction, not all of it was good science fiction. For every X-Files and Sliders that Fox produced, there were also shows like The Visitor, which no one remembers. While we'd like to think that Doctor Who is so brilliant that it can't be screwed up that badly, we have only to look at Dimensions In Time to know that it can. Also, by the 1997-98 television season, Fox was already producing The X-Files and Millennium (remember that?) and had started The Visitor. If they'd done Doctor Who instead of The Visitor, it would've aired on Friday nights at 8, where it might have suffered the humiliation of being beaten in the ratings by such fare as Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Boy Meets World. Let's say Fox put Doctor Who on opposite some other genre show to fight it out. Wednesday nights were out - Star Trek: Voyager aired that night, but Fox still had Party of Five on. If Fox had given up their Tuesday Night Movie slot - which is where the movie premiered - they could have aired Doctor Who opposite another series which had just begun the spring before: Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Um. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of those viewers. Which show would you rather watch on a Tuesday night: an Americanised knock-off of a British show, or Buffy? There's one other thing to consider: the half-human thing. Sure, the Doctor jokes about it later in the movie, but the Master notes it first. We've all been able to ignore this pretty easily - but if we'd gotten a TV series, not a chance. And finally, it's doubtful it would have lasted long - and that might have prevented the BBC from ever doing a series to begin with, even in 2005. Besides, who would want to see the Daleks again if they sounded like that? Speaking of Daleks...