Doctor Who: Paul McGann

Right from the first line things are wrong. "It was on the planet Skaro that my old enemy, the Master, was finally put on trial." Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Had the TV movie, McGann's sole on-screen appearance, continued on this track it would be easy to dismiss it as a complete failure and perhaps even write it out of continuity entirely. Make Eccleston the Eighth Doctor. As it is I wonder why Davies et al didn't just do that. There's far more that's wrong about the TV movie than there is right, and not just in terms of how it tries to work as a continuation of the classic series. The real problems are that the producers made the wrong decisions in trying to introduce all the specific traits of The Doctor, the TARDIS, etc. to the potential American audience the show was intended for.

First off, there's the regeneration. Out of all the things that make The Doctor a unique character and Time Lords a unique race regeneration is one of the least important ones to explain/show. It's only happened 10 times so far (8 on screen), less times than the Daleks or the Master have appeared, for instance. It's not something that defines The Doctor, it's something that allows the show to continue or go down new paths. A new audience doesn't need to know about it to understand what the show and the main character are. It's simply confusing that Sylvester McCoy walks out of the TARDIS after it's been shot at, gets shot and collapses. This is meant to be The Doctor's first real appearance to the American masses, and they present him as a complete dumbass. I wouldn't be surprised if people watching it at the time thought to themselves "Wait, wasn't he the main character? What's going on? Ah, fuck this." and they changed the channel.

And that's just one problem. It's not that I don't sympathize with the producers and understand the task they had ahead of them. They had 26 years of backstory to stay true to, but they were trying to bring in a new audience unfamiliar with all that, and unlike when Star Trek: The Next Generation was created they didn't have the option of jumping ahead a century or so and starting over with a fresh cast of characters.

But with the benefit of hindsight we can compare the TV movie to the second attempt to restart the series: Rose. It's unfair, really, but Rose nailed it on introducing the basics: The Doctor is ancient, alien, and a time-traveler, and his space-timeship looks like a police box and is bigger on the inside. And it's all delivered while we focus on Rose Tyler, the human that serves as the audience surrogate. (As did the very first episode back in 1963, where we start with Ian and Barbara and are introduced to The Doctor as they are.)

Compare that to the TV movie, which starts with the narrator talking about a character we know nothing about being sentenced to death on an alien planet we don't see again. Then we see a weird blue box (remember, police boxes never existed in America) and a guy sitting in a chair listening to music and apparently those two things are related? How were American audiences supposed to understand that?

Getting past the regeneration issue... actually, I don't want to nitpick everything that's wrong with the TV movie. There's general problems like Grace not being an interesting character and Eric Roberts-Master dressed in sunglasses and a leather jacket as an obvious allusion to The Terminator, and a couple things they did well like Chang finding out about the 'bigger on the inside' part (seemed very similar to the same scene in Rose, except this scene comes after the TARDIS has already been shown, so it doesn't quite work), and the explanation of the broken chameleon circuit was quick and efficient. And the bits where McGann finds a long scarf in the locker room or offers the cop a jelly baby show how to do callbacks/inside jokes properly.

But the real issue is that Doctor Who has never been anything more than a cult show in America and trying to attract an audience with a regeneration episode would never work. Regeneration stories always have the actor playing The Doctor finding their feet, figuring out how they're going to play the character. McGann comes across as just The Doctor Beta, a prototype of what the character is supposed to be like but without the unique aspects that distinguish any one Doctor from the others. As good as McGann is, a newly-regenerated Doctor is too blank to carry a story any more complex than "There's an alien menace oh look I just took care of it." Building the story around The Master trying to seize control of the heart of the TARDIS or whatever is too dependent on the show's backstory.

I think the best way to describe the failing of the TV movie is to invoke the redesign of the TARDIS interior. The classic 'white room and roundels' is easy to take in and gives new viewers something simple to latch onto, whereas the one for the TV movie looks like a lot of sets from other shows thrown together haphazardly as if to overload the audience and convince them something of substance is there. Had the TV movie taken a simpler approach it would have fared better, no doubt. Instead it's a big, overwrought mess.