Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: doctor who
Ex-showrunner and writer Steven Moffat explained why a hard reboot of Doctor Who would be a “bad idea” and the “nightmare option.”
Published Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:37:09 -0500 by Ray Flook
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Article Summary
Steven Moffat says a hard Doctor Who reboot is a bad idea, warning it creates confusion instead of a clean fresh start.
Moffat argues Doctor Who differs from James Bond and Sherlock because regeneration already signals continuity to viewers.
He calls retelling the Doctor stealing the TARDIS from Gallifrey the nightmare option and a terrible way to begin Doctor Who.
Moffat says any new Doctor Who team needs time to shape its vision, while insisting the show will return and still entertain.
As the waiting game for the release of the official Doctor Who tender details continues, we’ve been hearing from a whole lot of folks about what the future of the long-running show should look like. But ex-showrunner and writer Steven Moffat knows which approach he definitely does not endorse, and he made that clear in the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. While soft reboots come with their own set of issues, Moffat believes a hard reboot of the franchise would be a “bad idea.” And he used Sherlock Holmes and James Bond to help make his case.
“It’s not because I’m obsessed with continuity, or because I’m a hardcore fan,” he explained. “It requires more explanation than a soft reboot. Normally, when you reboot something, you can tell it’s a reboot. In ‘Sherlock,’ I didn’t need to explain that Benedict Cumberbatch is not playing a continuation of Jeremy Brett, because he’s a different actor. You don’t really expect Daniel Craig to be continuing the story of Pierce Brosnan. Because there’s a new actor, you instantly reset and say, ‘We’re starting again, it’s a new version'”
Moffat continued, “But with Doctor Who, the fact it’s a new actor doesn’t tell you that at all, so most people casually watching would just be assuming, ‘Oh, it’s the next version of Doctor Who, he’s changed again’. Then they’ll say, ‘Why doesn’t he know who the Daleks are?’ And you start getting confused. You’d have to keep reminding the audience, ‘We started from the beginning again.’ Unless of course you did the nightmare option – which is exactly the wrong thing to do – which is starting with Doctor Who stealing the TARDIS and running away from Gallifrey. That’s a terrible beginning for Doctor Who.”
Images: BBC Screencap; BBC
Checking in with Half the Picture earlier this month, Moffat addressed how the new production/creative team “will need a moment” to really bring together its vision for Doctor Who. “So long as everybody is talking about the future of the show, do you know what the show has? A future,” Moffat shared about all of the buzz over the show’s fate over the past few months. “If it’s an entirely new team, which I think it will be, they need a moment. They need a moment to sit back and say, ‘Okay, what’s it going to be this time? Who’s it going to be this time? What sort of show is it going to be?'” Moffat added. “Don’t go rushing into that, and meanwhile, you’ve got all of ‘Doctor Who,’ all of it, on your iPhone. You can sit and watch anything that we haven’t accidentally lost, and you’ll be fine. Just watch it all end to end and give them time to get them going. But it will be back, and it will be good.”
Moffat also had some interesting perspectives on television writing and the importance of remembering that a writer’s primary job is to entertain. “They never mention the word entertainment, which is the minimum condition of anything you write. Not theme, which some poor sods ask me about, and not subtext. Oh, do me a favour. It’s entertainment. That’s all you’re doing,” Moffat said. “When people come home at night to watch a TV show or go to the cinema to watch a movie or the theatre, that’s all they’re going for. They’re not going there for your thoughts on things. They’re not wanting to decode the inner mystery of it. They want you to provide approximately 90 minutes of entertainment so they can go to a restaurant and have a nice time. That’s it.”
But that doesn’t mean that Moffat’s telling writers not to hit on important themes and address key issues with their work; it just shouldn’t be at the expense of the viewers engaging with what’s on their screens. “If you’re anything beyond that, if you have deep philosophical insights, that’s fine, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of being entertaining,” he noted. “You should always be thinking what’s the next interesting thing that could happen? What would be exciting now? The simple rule is every sentence has to make you want to read the next sentence. All the words should lean forward. That’s what you’re doing. You’re trying not to bore people.”
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