There’s something uniquely irritating about being a Doctor Who fan in 2026. The programme has a machine capable of travelling anywhere in time and space, yet apparently can’t find its way onto a television schedule.
The last proper episode aired in May 2025. The Christmas special we were promised for 2026 has been cancelled. And the BBC’s newly announced production tender is looking towards a series intended for transmission in 2028 or 2029.
We could be looking at a gap of three or four years between full series of Doctor Who. Three or four years. For a programme that once managed to send the Doctor on thirteen adventures a year, plus a Christmas special, without requiring an international corporate partnership and what feels like a United Nations summit to get it made.
And the most frustrating part? We were told all of this was supposed to make Doctor Who bigger.
The bigger, better, considerably less frequent Whoniverse
When the BBC and Disney announced their partnership in 2022, it sounded like a remarkable opportunity. A bigger budget, a global streaming platform and Russell T Davies returning to lead the programme into its next era. The BBC and Disney explicitly presented it as an ambitious expansion of the franchise.
And to launch this brave new future, what did we get?
David Tennant.
Now, I love David Tennant. Bringing him and Catherine Tate back for the 60th anniversary was an excellent way to celebrate the programme’s history. But it also revealed the strange contradiction at the heart of modern Doctor Who. A show built around change was announcing its exciting new beginning by bringing back its most recognisable modern Doctor.
Then came Ncuti Gatwa, who brought enormous energy and personality to the role. He deserved the opportunity to establish himself over several substantial series. Instead, his era amounted to two eight-episode seasons before his departure in May 2025.
Sixteen regular episodes in two years. That used to be little more than a single series.
The problem with treating Doctor Who like a franchise
Somewhere along the way, Doctor Who started behaving less like a television programme and more like an intellectual property portfolio.
We have the Whoniverse. We have international distribution agreements. We have spin-offs, merchandise, anniversary celebrations and an apparently endless supply of returning characters.
What we don’t have is a regular television series.
Disney’s involvement undoubtedly offered production opportunities, but it also tied the programme’s future to a partnership that ultimately wasn’t renewed. Disney confirmed in October 2025 that it wouldn’t be returning for another season. The BBC subsequently promised a Christmas 2026 special, before cancelling that too.
It’s tempting to call this greed. Certainly, the ambition to turn Doctor Who into a much larger global entertainment property was explicit from the beginning. But we don’t know that financial ambition alone caused the current hiatus. Production costs, commissioning decisions and the BBC’s obligations all play a part.
What we can say is that the grand expansion hasn’t delivered the one thing viewers should reasonably expect from a television programme: television.
Nostalgia is supposed to be a treat, not the entire menu
Then there’s the nostalgia.
I don’t object to old Doctors returning. I don’t object to classic villains. Some of the greatest Doctor Who stories have embraced the show’s past. The problem is the increasing sense that every major development needs to be accompanied by something familiar.
Tennant returns. Catherine Tate returns. Classic villains return. The 2025 finale ends with Ncuti Gatwa regenerating into Billie Piper, the actress who played Rose Tyler.
That last moment should have been an extraordinary cliffhanger. Instead, with the programme’s future uncertain, it became a question the BBC seemingly wasn’t ready to answer.
It’s difficult to get invested in a new Doctor when the show seems perpetually distracted by the people who used to be in it.
And this is a programme uniquely equipped to avoid that problem. Regeneration is one of the greatest storytelling devices ever invented for a long-running television series. Every new Doctor offers the opportunity to reinvent the show, introduce a new audience and tell stories that couldn’t have existed before.
Yet modern Doctor Who sometimes seems terrified of moving forward without reminding us how much we loved it twenty years ago.
Remember when Doctor Who was actually on?
There’s a reason the 2005 revival worked so brilliantly. Russell T Davies took a programme with decades of history and made it feel immediate. You didn’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Gallifrey to enjoy Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper running away from plastic mannequins.
It was funny, frightening, ridiculous, emotional and, most importantly, accessible.
It was also on television regularly enough for people to develop a relationship with it.
The Doctor became part of Saturday evenings. Children had a new adventure to discuss on Monday morning. The Christmas special became an event because it was an addition to a programme people were already watching, rather than a solitary transmission expected to sustain an entire franchise.
That’s what gets lost in these enormous hiatuses. Doctor Who isn’t just a collection of individual episodes. At its best, it’s a cultural habit.
You can’t maintain that habit by disappearing for years and expecting a returning face or an anniversary trailer to do all the work when you eventually come back.
Just give us Doctor Who
The BBC says cancelling the 2026 Christmas special will allow it to invest in the programme’s long-term future. Perhaps that will prove to be the right decision. A proper new series with a clear creative direction is certainly preferable to rushing out a one-off episode simply to fill a gap.
But the next incarnation of Doctor Who needs to resist the temptation to make yet another grand announcement about the future of the Whoniverse.
Give us a Doctor. Give us a companion. Give us monsters, mysteries, historical adventures, strange planets and the occasional episode that makes absolutely no sense but is entertaining enough that nobody cares.
Give the new Doctor enough episodes to become our Doctor rather than another brief chapter in a franchise retrospective.
And, for the love of God, put it on television often enough that we remember it’s still being made.
Doctor Who doesn’t need to be the biggest science-fiction franchise in the world. It needs to be a good television programme.
Preferably one that actually airs.