10 Things The Doctor Who Reboot MUST Do
9. A More Sophisticated Tone
If Doctor Who wants to be taken more seriously again, its needs to take itself more seriously.
For a start that means ditching all the sillier aspects of RTD2. The musical numbers. The dancing. The cringe, childish humour. The constant flashbacks and callbacks, which just made the show feel like a parody of itself.
Doctor Who has often swung from one extreme to another, and now would be the perfect time to go in a more mature and sophisticated direction.
That doesn't mean it needs to be the most bleak and depressing thing on TV, it's just that its baseline should be a bit more grounded.
Have the Doctor solving a murder mystery that spans the cosmos. Or go more horror-infused, like the early Tom Baker seasons. Or more in tune with real-world science (which is how we ended up with stuff like the Cybermen in the '60s).
Doctor Who should also be smarter and more ambitious with its storytelling, not just its tone. Steven Moffat was criticised for making Doctor Who too convoluted, but the kind of ambition he displayed with his complex time travel stories and series arcs is something we need more of, not less.
Particularly in the streaming age, people don’t want stuff that plays it safe. They want stuff that’s breaking new ground and doing something different.