So, a while back, before a number of personal tragedies and minor inconveniences, I wrote a post about a certain cult show that isn't so cult any more. I left it open-ended, intending to write a follow-up post that goes past those early memories into my growing appreciation of the show and my tentative steps into "fandom", such as it was.
This is not that post, or at least, not how I intended it to turn out. I may get back to that, or whatever bits of it I don't use here, but, frankly, it would have been boring, trite, list-y trash, and I've already done several of those posts anyway. I'm in a different place now, and I'm trying to work something out here, fine tune my writing anyway. I can't just go "Here Is a Thing That Happened And It Sometimes Had a Meaning To Me And Here Is the Next Thing" every time. This thing, though... this thing...
*sigh* Okay, so you may have heard Doctor Who has made a bit of a comeback in recent years and is now, like, the biggest deal ever on both sides of the Atlantic as well as both sides of the gender gap. And it's genuinely mostly good, with flashes of brilliance, thanks in no small part to the lead actors and the all-star crop of writers. (Neil Gaiman! Paul Cornell! The fella who wrote Coupling!) This is one of the better-crafted science-fantasy adventure shows to come down the pike in recent years. However... it's lacking something. Some fundamental oddball quality, some cheap weirdness, some indefinable thing that would compel me to stay up way too late on a Saturday night to watch.
New Who just isn't late-night Saturday viewing; it's Prime Time. And that's just what it needs to stay healthy in a 21st century television environment. In a post-Buffy world, even fantasy-adventure shows need defined character arcs and storylines, however awkward the fit is (*cough*badwolf*cough*). And it proved to be successful, not just in the UK, where it was regarded as a fond memory, but also in the US, where its status at the time could be described as "cult at best" (or "that weird section in Suncoast Video").
But here's the thing. I don't know whether it's out of some misguided resentment over missing out due to lack of cable, or because my expectations were too high, or because of the new fanbase the new show was cultivating but I realized that I'm just not as enthusiastic about New Who as I thought I'd be. But that's okay. Plenty other people are. Plenty.
Back in the day, my quiet, shy-around-girls, teenage self was able to find maybe one other person in my whole high school who watched Doctor Who, but, aside from during the downtime between matches at that one Quiz Bowl event, she and I didn't get to talk much about it (see "shy around girls"). I even tried to get one of my college roommates to watch "Inferno" before admitting defeat and just hooking headphones up to the TV. Nowadays, you can't throw a virtual stone in the global ideaspace without hitting a TARDIS, or a cartoon Dalek, or a gender-swapped version of the Eleventh Doctor complete with fez. Like it or not, thanks to the revival, New Who is huge. And Classic Who seems to get lost in its younger sibling's wake.
I think that's what I'm getting at, here. It sometimes feels like Classic Who has been marginalized to make way for the new. The show I fell in love with, the bubble-wrap monsters, action by HAVOC, the anything-can-happen adventure, has been supplanted in the public eye by CGI spectacle, "timey-wimey", and overwrought storylines. More people know "I don't want to go!" than "It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for." This thing, this wonderful, weird TV show I grew up with doesn't matter to them, and that's a little disheartening. Though, I should be glad they at least get a version of the Doctor for them. (And I have to admit, Matt Smith really gets into the role in a way we haven't seen in a long time.)
I still like New Who (well, mostly). Just in a different way from the classic stuff. Fortunately, Classic Who isn't exactly dead. The DVDs are being released (and re-released!) steadily over the years to revisit at any time. I follow three different rewatches of the classic series online (plus another in print). As noted before, audio drama group Big Finish have put out new stories with a classic vibe for something like 13 years now. And, if I'm really desperate, I can dig into my stack of old paperbacks from the so-called "wilderness years". Plus, there's the added bonus of not getting any funny looks when I mention Doctor Who in public, so, yeah, it's not a total loss.
Now, who's up for some "Talons of Weng-Chiang", hmm?
I share your ambivalence about new Who. I grew up on public TV reruns of old Who and loved it as actively as one reasonably could in a small southern town pre-internet, pre-normalization/branding of geek chic. When the series was finally revived, I took my time getting to it, and once I did, I wasn't sure what I thought. Too much mushy stuff, for one thing. I think of Amy Pond glomping Matt Smith and consider how that would play if he was Jon Pertwee, because, you know, he is.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping that with the 50th anniversary there will be some effort to exalt old Who through the prism of the new, although I know there's no turning the clock back...[rimshot]