Doctor Who Season 8: 10 Ways They Could Screw It Up

4. The Series Length

Come August, we€™re back to a continuous run of thirteen episodes, which many fans have taken as a good thing. Admittedly, there is something just right about Doctor Who running in the autumn- the longer nights are perfect for the Gothic tinge we€™ve been promised. In other ways, however, a longer series is not such a good thing. The need to fill thirteen slots in the production schedule will almost certainly result in the return of those unloved mid-season clunkers. The first few, phenomenally successful, series of NuWho usually experienced a ratings slump mid-way through their runs. Nowadays, the popularity of iPlayer means that the number of viewers who watch a programme as live counts for less than it did even in 2005. There are still legitimate problems with a straight thirteen episode run, though. It€™s no coincidence that those slumps occurred around episodes 6 or 7. Logic dictates that you push your big crowd-pleasing episodes to the beginning and end of the series, when most people are likely to tune in. That€™s also where you stick the budget. Everything after that€well, how often do The Long Game, The Idiot€™s Lantern and The Lazarus Experiment crop up in the average Whovian€™s all-time top 10? By their very nature they€™re lacklustre. Moffat€™s split seasons were criticised, but they achieved a more thorough consistency of quality. In that format, we effectively got four mini-seasons of crowd-pleasers. To go back to the old model seems€frankly baffling.