Doctor Who: Ranking All 13 Doctors From Worst To Best

11. The First Doctor (William Hartnell)

Doctor Who might not be around today had William Hartnell not helped to make the show's early years such a success, and for that, we shall forever be in his debt.

But the bad thing about him being the first incarnation is that every actor who came afterwards has had the opportunity to refine and improve upon the character, and for that reason, the First Doctor lacks the depth we've come to expect from the character.

Like the Sixth Doctor, the First Doctor was quite hard to like, but not because he was annoying or self-centred. Rather, Hartnell played the character like a strict grandfather, and he was quite rude and harsh at times. On the plus side, this gave him a commanding screen presence, and he was a genuinely intimidating, scary figure. Whenever he faced the Daleks - or some other alien threat - you had no trouble believing that he could save the day.

Unfortunately, there really isn't much else to the character beyond his cold and distant personality, and a pinch of charm would have gone a long way.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!