Let's just say it and get it off our chests: we all know Doctor Who isn't all that great. There are those fans who find the show endlessly charming and are swept away by the romance of The Doctor and his history, but for many that's not quite enough to make up for the limitations producing a space opera twice the length of most other British series on a BBC budget. Those limitations don't just come down to poor special effects, laughable prosthetics and sub-par supporting actors - though those are some of the more off-putting and consistent elements that have pervaded throughout the series' on and off 50-year run. The biggest issues for some viewers have always been the quality of the writing and the recycling of old villains and plots to keep the series going. A huge problem with creating a successful multi-season TV series in Britain is that most production companies don't have enough money to hire more writers than the bare minimum required to get the thing on the air. As opposed to the American writers' room system, which has a person write a draft that is then edited and added to by a staff of writers so that every line of dialogue is polished and every scene is made crucial to the story, the British system sees a single writer (or a pair if you're lucky) work on their own or with a script editor to produce their story. Doctor Who has more writers than most, but the corny dialogue and often unimaginative structure of many episodes suggests that scripts aren't given as thorough a second opinion as they really should. If Doctor Who was conceived as a comic not only would the authors be better able to tell stories about space adventures and time travel more effectively, they would also be able to more convincingly include the horror elements the series has long strived for but failed to properly incorporate, and if there was less emphasis on producing so many episodes in a year the writers might just be able to come up with something at least semi-original every month. What do you think of our list? Agree with us or couldn't disagree more? And did we miss any shows off the list that deserve to be reinvented more? Let us know in the comments.
