Russell T. Davies leaves Doctor Who

[Sylph]

Well, I'd like to think so, too! Thank you!

As for Dr. Who, it's not that I'm a die-hard fan - I'm not; occasionally, I find it unbearable. I just sometimes catch myself waiting for the next great script. And perhaps that is the main reason why I watch it - I'm able to endure the cr*p as long as there will be other great moments. You're so right when you say Steven brought back the creepiness, that's why I like his work a lot - he can hop from comedy to creepiness and then to Tintin in no time!

I'll check Waking the Dead, I trust your taste.

US version was so baaad. I mean - it featured the infamous show-killer Rena Sofer as Susan Freeman! But apparently (and of course) the network messed a lot with the script. Steven said that Phoef Sutton's version of the pilot, that I think never aired, was loads better than his version of his own show! Go figure!

But I really, really loved the UK version! Jane is my all-time favourite character ever! And what I loved enormously was how Moffat played with the structure; in that sense, one of my favourite episodes is the one where Oliver is introduced titled Nine and a Half Minutes.

And the best episode ever, well actually two episodes are Inferno and the one where they all talk on the phone - Nightlines. Every episode was great!

I used to love it, too! I think the shooting begins in the fall. Maybe I'm mistaken.

[Sylph]

By the way, who is Marinella Frostrup?

[JamesF]

That's a question anyone would struggle to answer. She's a um...journalist? Slash presenter. Known for her voice and not much else. I don't know what she's working on these days if anything. Oh she might have slept with a politician once but then again I may just be spreading baseless gossip.

I very rarely watch Dr Who but I'll be interested to see how the writer change impacts on the show. Russell T Davies has become a sort of celebrated writer without any real up-to-date qualitative evidence that he's any good. The entirety of the show's success is attributed to him because he has such enthusiasm in interviews but I've no idea how much he's actually responsible for. Is he still going to be spearheading Deadwood?

LOVE her. Had no idea she was going to be in it.

Re: Waking the Dead. the creator Barbara Machin seems to be becoming a 'name' with a couple of new series on th agenda. Hard to believe she's got a history of writing for Casualty of all shows.

[Sylph]

I misspelt her name - she is Mariella. Anyway, I think she guest-starred in one episode of Coupling and all the men in the show seem to be infatuated by her.

I have no idea about Deadwood. Did you watch Queer as Folk?

What other UK shows would you recommend? What's The Street like?

[JamesF]

I need to rewatch the Coupling reruns on cable. I liked the bits and pieces I saw but it was one of those shows in my teenage years that everybody else raved about so I decided I wasn't going to bother with it. Thankfully I'm over that kind of pretension these days. Mostly.

I can't believe I said Deadwood. I meant Torchwood. Yes I watched QAF recently all the way through. I'd seen it as a 15 year old and for obvious reasons it all sort of seemed alien to me. But having dipped into it a few months ago I really, really enjoyed it. Some of the acting is still ropey but the writing is really sharp. Clever. It's also strange seeing a load of bars I'm familiar with as they were a decade ago. My only problem was with the sequel. It was okay for the most part but the final ten minutes turned into over indulgent pap and it's a shame that they were the final moments of an otherwise great show.

The other Russell T Davies work I loved was the soap Revelations in the 1990s. It was utter trash and I don't know whether it lives up to my rose tinted memories but it was subversive fun.

When it's good it's phenomenal and when it's not, you really feel like you've wasted an hour. It's certainly a fantastic concept.

I'm not sure what else I could recommend presently because I really don't watch too many British series these days. I adored Love Soup but the chances of that coming back are negligible. It feels as though apart from the dreary mainstays (The Royal, The Bill, Heartbeat, Holby City etc) there isn't much in the way of series TV, comedy or drama. Most of the decent stuff tends to be one off or mini-series.

[Toups]

Sylph, you're a Coupling fan? I so didn't expect that! LOL Coupling is one of my favorite shows ever.

[EricMontreal22]

This was rumoured for ages. Moffat has written many of the best episodes (though he was involved with the awful spin off seeming ending to the recent Doctor's Daughter UGH) so I'm pleased. Davies will still be there in some capacity and as brilliant as he can be (witness his Queer as Folk series one, Bob and Rose and some of the best Who) he was running out of ideas--and I didn't like his attempts to be juvenile/appeal to kids (too many gross body function jokes, etc, seemed to be his best way at humour).

I hope showrunner Chris Chibnell (sp?) is staying ona s headwriter for spin off Torchwood though--he's finally gotten the tone in season 2 spot on.

And I aodred the Uk Coupling too, 'natch

James RUssell Davies NEVER spearheaded torchwood. Chris Chibnell (sp? I always spell his name wrong) always did though Davies helped write some key episodes and set it up. I think Davies gets more credit for Torchwood than he deserves--good and bad-0-I knwo some people who dislike the pansexuality of characters in Torchwood blame it on Davies cuz of his past when it's largely been Chibnell's idea.

He didn't write much of Revelations I thought? Am I wrong?

I still think QAFolk holds up--series one. It's often brilliant and compared to the American/Canadian co production it's all the stronger. It really is great tv writing. I agree about the ifnale but he did that partly so they wouldn't try to carry on the sequel--as he said, despite waht the network wante,d he thought the story of how this younger just out guy was still always hanging aroudn these two 30 somethign friends had played its course and there was no more story to tell (I wish the AMerican writers thought that way) so he wanted to make it clear it was over. Of course there was meant to be a followup sitcom involved Vince's Mom and that group which coulda been very funny but it fell through last minute. (I also appreciated that Davies made it clear he wrote QAF about a group of gay characters--not meant to represent gays in general--all gays. The American version DID try to represent all gays--and all lesbians, as the new producers even said in some interviews feeling it was brave of them to show more different types of gays when I think it was a mistake)

Bob and Rose unfairly got some criticism by gays who felt betrayed and thought the show was implyigng that any gay guy could turn straight if he found the right woman. People who felt that way obviously never ever watched it IMHo. It was a beautifully acted character portrayal--much more low key but even more touching than QAF that I love and have rewatched a few times.

he also did the apolcalyptic sci fi tv drama Second Coming with the actress from Rose and the first Doctor, Chris E which i thoguth was very very good low budget sci fi from a very serious political and religious angle. I knwo he also did some well loved childrens sci fi/horror in the early 90s (one show had a young Kate Winslett) but haven't seen. I do think, while he may be overated he does have the talent most of the time to back it up. I am glad he never showran Torchwood though for some reason--I thinK Chris gets the feel much better.

[Sylph]

After you check it out, let us know. Toups opened a whole thread about Coupling.

So is The Street still airing or has it completed its run?

So... Since you don't watch British, what US shows do you follow?

[Sylph]

Yes, a big fan. My favourite character is, of course, Jane!

[EricMontreal22]

I finally watched this past Saturdays' Dr Who, a Moffat episode. MY only concern is that it was only part one and I don't see how part 2 can top it. Absolutely brilliant--the final creepy, surreal, bizarre and oddly pathos filled scene had me thrilled in a way no tv show has for ages it seems. Great effects (WHo can suffer from low production values, as can Torchwood but they know how to do with what they have way better than shows like Supernatural-a show I like but one that never gets as witty or clever with its effects--or writing). It was almost as if Moffat wanted to make sure people all knew he was up to the job of showrunner.

Came at the right time too cuz the middle of this series of Who was kinda getting lame, after a great start (something I find to be a prob with most seasons of Who and even Torchwood which I was, up to this episode, startign to much prefer)

[Sylph]

Was it Silence in the Library?

[EricMontreal22]

Indeed. Made up for some of the misfires immediatley before, this season.

[Ben]

I had a crush on Mariella Frostrup during my teen years... Anyway, I'd describe her as a journalist/TV presenter. She was big in the nighties (mostly due to her infamous voice, which most people can only get from smoking. )

I was shocked to learn that Barbara Machin wrote Kiss of Death. That truly was an horrendous mess. For those that don't know, Kiss of Death was a two-parter, which the BBC squished into one episode. It stared CSI's Louise Lombard and was promoted as Boomtown meets CSI. Everything about it was horrible.

As for Casualty, why is that show still on air?

The Street hasn't returned since last year, after it's second season. It's first season was really good. Very gritty. The second was hit 'n' miss - mostly miss, as I tuned out mid-way. There were a couple of good episodes, but from the ones I saw, they either felt very much like season 1 plots, or were totally clichéd.

Like James, I don't watch many English shows. The ones that stick out in my mind are, Waking the Dead, Spooks (MI-5 to you), Torchwood, Peep Show - which I've just discovered. It's hilarious; I can't believe it's been going for five seasons, and I've only just found it! Oh, and Holby City, which I've been watching for a year. I don't really pay attention anymore; just waiting for Faye's secret to be revealed. I do support the show, as it's a kind of stepping stone for new writers. So, out of the vast number of channels, that isn't very many...

Oh, and if it counts, I'm also watching reruns of The Avengers. This is one of my all-time favourite shows. Wasn't it one of the first to air on a mainstream American network?

Oh, I recommend Peep Show! You might like it, and you might not. Depends on how you like your comedy.

[EricMontreal22]

The AVengers and Prisoner (not the AUssie prison soap) were two of the first big British cult shows in N America in the 60s (I think some PBS stations started airing Who back then too but...)

I thought I watched a lot of British imports but really besides the lit adaptations that become part of PBS Masterpiece (as it's now rebranded) and Who and Torchwood (and yes I'mn embarassed to admit the kiddie spin off Sarah Jane Adventures) currently there aren't a lot of British shows I watch... I did watch Moffat's Jeckyll. All of FOotballer's Wives and its lame spin off (blush) and I like, despite myself, the over the top, often surreal and fairly controversial teen soap Skins (a show I can't see even a cable network in the US picking up just cuz of all the "teen" nudity, drug use and swearing), but...

They show a sorta CSI type British show here in Canada called Murder City which despite such a bad name doesn't seem bad--or extraordinarily good.

[Sylph]

June 15, 2008

Who Altered British TV? ‘Who’ Indeed

By SARAH LYALL

CARDIFF, Wales

RUSSELL T DAVIES, perhaps the most admired writer and producer working in British television drama, was once confronted at a wedding by a fellow guest bristling with indignation about a scene in Mr. Davies’s hugely successful, family-friendly science fiction series, “Doctor Who.” In the scene Capt. Jack Harkness, a swaggering intergalactic hero who exuberantly lusts after both men and women, plants quick kisses on the mouths of both the title character and the title character’s female sidekick as they face imminent death. (Everyone survives.)

Mr. Davies’s first instinct — as a reasonable person, as a happily gay man — was to be relaxed and placatory, he said. But something snapped.

“I was standing there saying, ‘You’re a bad mother, and your children will either grow up to be lesbians, or they will be taken into care because they’ve been badly raised,’ ” he recalled in a recent interview near the “Doctor Who” set. He began to chuckle. “ ‘You are ignorant, and you’re bringing up your children in ignorance, and that will backfire on you.’ ”

Luckily, the woman’s husband escorted her away before a fistfight broke out. But the incident was jolting, in part because it was such an anomaly. Mr. Davies, 44, had already won these arguments, at least with most people, years before. So successfully has he pushed the boundaries of British television that he sometimes forgets how far it, and he, have come.

“He has basically changed the face of television in the U.K.,” said John Barrowman, who plays Captain Jack in both “Doctor Who” and a spinoff series, “Torchwood,” which is aimed at adults. “He has taken subject matter that nobody else will touch, and he has put in characters that nobody else will bother doing.”

And he has done it with mainstream programs that are immensely popular. In the last three and a half years he has built “Doctor Who,” “Torchwood” and another spinoff, “The Sarah Jane Adventures,” into Britain’s most successful homegrown drama franchise. Mr. Davies recently announced that he would step down as executive producer and head writer of “Doctor Who” at the end of 2009, in order to pursue other projects (he won’t say what they are). But at a time when young audiences are fleeing television for the Internet and other hipper media, “Davies has made family television cool again,” in the words of The Guardian.

It is hard to overstate “Doctor Who’s” significance for Britons of a certain age. First broadcast in 1963, when many households here were just getting used to that novel new device, the television set, it was a triumph of family viewing, a science fiction show that (unlike, say, “Star Trek,” with its particular audience) parents and children stayed home to watch together.

The show followed the adventures of a time-traveling character whose spaceship was cunningly disguised as an old-fashioned telephone booth and who saved the universe by means of immortality, brilliance, a mordant sense of humor and an array of useful enemy-thwarting devices. It remained on the air in one form or another until 1989, the potential awkwardness of having a succession of different actors in the title role explained airily away by the Doctor’s ability to morph into a different body every few years.

The new “Doctor Who” is broadcast during Britain’s family friendliest hour — just after dinner on Saturday nights — and it too has morphed into something else altogether, science fiction that is playful, sophisticated, emotionally resonant and peppered with lightning-quick allusions to literary works, to classic “Doctor Who” episodes from long ago, and to historical events and people. But Mr. Davies presses his grown-up themes with a whisper and a laugh, not a shout. No one actually has sex on screen in “Doctor Who.” And when Captain Jack makes an appearance (only rarely, since he now has his own show), his sexuality is an issue only in that his constant, equal-opportunity flirting tends to annoy his colleagues, busy as they are fighting intergalactic evil.

“He takes ‘Doctor Who’ and pushes the envelope the whole time, not in terms of taste and decency but in terms of ideas and emotional intelligence, the size of feeling and epic stroke of narrative breadth,” said Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction. She said that no one at the BBC had ever had a problem with Captain Jack or with any of Mr. Davies’s plotlines. “How ridiculous would it be that you would travel through time and space and only ever find heterosexual men?” Ms. Tranter said.

Hiring Mr. Davies to remake the beloved but, finally, creaky old series was a daring, even counterintuitive move by the BBC. First there was the worry that “Doctor Who” had already had its day, that it belonged to another era altogether. But more than that, Mr. Davies was a risk taker with no obvious science-fiction credentials other than a fanatical lifelong devotion to “Doctor Who” and a headful of ideas about where to take it next. At the time, in 2003, he was best known for “Queer as Folk,” a 1999 series that chronicled the lives of a group of hedonistic gay men in Manchester with a frankness never shown before on mainstream television. (It was later remade in the United States.)

“Queer as Folk” was revolutionary not only because of its racy subject matter but also because of the matter-of-fact way it presented its characters: ordinary people, if unusually attractive and sexually frisky, who happened to be gay. Criticism of its content tended to be overshadowed by admiration for its wit and verve and for the mature fun of its story lines. Mr. Davies used the same philosophy when Captain Jack came on the scene in “Doctor Who” — make it entertaining, not didactic.

“I thought, ‘It’s time you introduce bisexuals properly into mainstream television,’ ” he said, laughing.

He tends to see the joke in most things and talks about television with a words-spilling-over-each-other enthusiasm. What better way to introduce a charming bisexual character, he asked, than to make him “an outer space buccaneer?”

“The most boring drama would be” — here he put on a whiny, fractious voice — “ ‘Oh, I’m bisexual, oh my bleeding heart’ nighttime drama. Tedious, dull. But if you say it’s a bisexual space pirate swaggering in with guns and attitude and cheek and humor into prime-time family viewing: that was enormously attractive to me.”

“Doctor Who,” “Torchwood” and “The Sarah Jane Adventures,” which is aimed at children and stars one of the original characters from early “Doctor Who,” have helped win numerous awards and accolades for Mr. Davies, who was named Industry Player of the Year in 2006 at the Edinburgh Television Festival. This season’s opening episode of “Doctor Who” drew 9.14 million viewers — more than one-seventh of the population of Britain. (In the United States “Doctor Who” appears on the Sci Fi Channel. “Torchwood” appears on BBC America and this season was its highest-rated program ever.)

Mr. Davies, who was born in Swansea, Wales, is tall and solid, his broad face dominated by a pair of black-rimmed glasses similar to those worn by Doctor Who himself. His middle initial doesn’t stand for anything; he added it early in his career to distinguish himself from a radio host who shared his name. He lives partly here and partly in Manchester and has a longtime companion who works as a customs inspector for the British government.

After a childhood in which his twin obsessions were television and comic books, he found work as a writer and producer in children’s television. He wrote for soap operas, contributed to long-running dramas and, before “Queer as Folk,” wrote “The Grand,” a multipart drama set in a hotel in the 1920s. Some of his programs have been more successful than others, but most get talked about. In 2003 he tackled religion, to controversial effect, with “The Second Coming,” a two-part drama in which a video-shop owner from Manchester realizes he is the son of God.

But it is the transformation of “Doctor Who” that has cemented Mr. Davies’s reputation. In the old days the program could be one-dimensional, almost cheesy, with cheap special effects that sometimes verged on the Ed Woodian. But serious money is being lavished on the new production. And under the care of Mr. Davies, who writes or supervises the writing of every episode, it has been imbued with newfound sensitivity, pathos and humor.

The hope is that that will be true even after Mr. Davies leaves. After the 2009 season, which is to consist of four specials rather than weekly episodes, he will be succeeded by Steven Moffat, the writer behind the successful series “Coupling” who has written some memorable “Doctor Who” episodes in the past few years.

Over these recent seasons the Doctor has traveled to far-off planets where unspeakable creatures do unspeakable things. He has traveled to Pompeii while Vesuvius erupted. He has rescued Queen Victoria from a giant werewolf, embarked on a heartbreaking love affair with Madame de Pompadour — it ended tragically, on account of her mortality — and saved Earth from annihilation by numerous bad-tempered aliens.

Mr. Davies’s “Doctor Who” has examined the bonds that tie us to even annoying family members. It has plumbed the mysteries and possibilities of chaste love. It has made the case against slavery and violence, played with existential questions about past, present and future and explored what happens when everyone is about to be annihilated by poison gas spewing from automotive exhaust pipes.

alert viewers will notice the frequent juxtaposition of peril and comedy — the Doctor and his sidekick, Donna, start bickering about how to pronounce the name of some extraterrestrial villains who are within an inch of murdering her, for instance — as well as other signature Davies touches. When the Doctor meets Shakespeare in an episode set during the writing of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Shakespeare throws him a lustful glance.

“Davies dresses these things up in such a friendly plotline that we all have a warm glow, and he gets away with murder,” said Peter Bazalgette, the former chief creative officer of Endemol, the production company that has been responsible for some very popular British programs, including “Big Brother” and “Deal or No Deal.” “It genuinely represents the liberalization of society, which he is leading and reflecting. I think he’s a genius.”

Then there is “Torchwood,” which Mr. Davies describes as “science fiction for adults.” Broadcast later in the evening, it follows the adventures of a group of operatives who thwart the aliens that have a habit of finding their way to Cardiff. It is darker, sharper and less chaste than “Doctor Who.” Mr. Barrowman looks like a bigger and better Tom Cruise and has the charismatic bravado the role requires. Captain Jack makes no apologies; no one asks him to.

In one episode Captain Jack has a full-on fighting-and-making-out session with a former lover turned enemy. Whatever he does, Captain Jack has great fun doing it, which is the point, Mr. Davies said.

“I often get asked to write dramas or films about a man coming out of the closet to his wife, or a man coming out of the closet to his children, or a man who’s beaten up because he’s secretly gay,” Mr. Davies said. “I always refuse if it’s a negative take on homosexuality — if the only aspect being portrayed is the trouble, the tears and the angst.”

He continued: “There’s enough of that out there. Why bother? Drama is easy when it’s tragedy. Anyone could write a scene of a man crying in the rain saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ But actually it’s much more fun to see a man in a bar trying to pick up another man. That’s tense. There’s a whole minefield of emotions there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/arts/television/15lyal.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin