10 MORE Times Doctor Who Lied To Your Face

"That’s a serious plan: annual Doctor Who, no gap years, lots of content, on and on and on. Yes please!"

So Russell T Davies told Doctor Who Magazine back in December 2022. What a difference two and a bit years makes, huh?

Here in 2025 we're not even sure when the show is coming back. RTD's assurance of annual Doctor Who is kind of being fudged by pushing The War Between the Land and the Sea into a 2026 release date, but the fact remains that it's a promise left unfulfilled.

In fairness to Russell T Davies, he probably believed that he'd be able to pull these plans off when he wrote his column back in 2022. But still, he must have known that there was a good chance he wouldn't be able to fulfill the promise of yearly Doctor Who. His promise ignores outside factors like streaming figures, Disney's subscriber numbers, and the corporate whims of the House of Mouse.

Even taking Mickey Mouse out of the equation, it's a show that is incredibly hard to make, which is why there were so many gaps in the Moffat and Chibnall years. It got to a point where our steady diet of 13 episodes a year, plus a Christmas special, just became unsustainable. Annual episode counts decreased from 14 to 13 to 11, with longer and longer gaps springing up. And so with all that in mind, isn't an empty promise just as bad as an outright lie?

On the optimistic side, hopefully lessons have been learned from the debacle of the Disney era, and Doctor Who might finally become the annual show we all hope it can be.

And no Russell, that doesn't include 5-episode Sea Devil spinoffs...