This story from The Inquisitr http://www.inquisitr.com/1726498/could-sinking-doctor-who-ratings-mean-the-end-for-steven-moffatt/
Could Sinking ‘Doctor Who’ Ratings Mean The End For Steven Moffat?
According to the Mirror, the primary complaints among fans are the story lines which have become too complicated and adult oriented. The British TV show has been a child friendly, family show since it first aired in 1963. Now, with increasingly adult plot lines and a start time of 8:30 p.m. in Great Britain, many families no longer watch the show together and the ratings have suffered.
A senior BBC official told the Mirror that the network is determined to make changes to address concerns.
“There will be some tweaks. We are obviously keen for it to appeal to the whole family.”Most concerning to the BBC are the ratings. According to Doctor Who TV, Series Eight averaged fewer than seven million viewers during the season. This is a noticeable fall from previous seasons and more than enough reason for Moffat to be concerned. The previous incarnation of Doctor Who, featuring Matt Smith, averaged over eight million viewers.
As reported by the Inquisitr, Steven Moffat has defended the sagging ratings, claiming that streaming services like iPlayer and Amazon made up the difference. Moffat claimed “exactly the same number of people watch ‘Doctor Who’ now as they ever did.”
Moffat did however concede the need to make changes as the show progressed.
“We actually have changed it up quite a lot, look how different those girls have been. Wait and see. What we have is probably the most enduring form of the show and I think will always tend back to it for whatever reason, but there’s no reason you couldn’t tend away from it and there’s no diktat or special rule book left by Verity Lambert or something. We absolutely could vary it. The times they’ve varied it, it makes them work hard – you can see them struggling with Leela. She was a great character but they had to civilize her fast because it was getting hard to fit her into stories – but it’s not a hard and fast rule at all.”Fans have recently taken to Twitter to express their displeasure with the Doctor Who show runner. Fan have complained about the storytelling tropes and poor storytelling.
With Doctor Who Series Nine set to start filming in January, Moffat is in no danger of losing his job in the near future. Following the somewhat disastrous results of Series Eight, his leash is certainly shorter. Even with a planned return to more family friendly stories, this may be Moffat’s last chance.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1726498/could-sinking-doctor-who-ratings-mean-the-end-for-steven-moffatt/#jLPRT2KqY1IiF9v1.99
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Absolute balls. Let's get this straight, Dr Who initially began as a childrens programme but was still damn scary. I watched from the first Hartnell episode and some of the menace in his character as well as some of the storylines were far from "kiddy" orientated.
Patrick Troughton's Dr Who also faced some bizarre and scary stories and menaces -Troughton made it less threatening when needed by "playing the clown".
Jon Pertwee's Dr Who....Inferno creeped the crap out of me and I was much older by then. There were other stories of a similar ilk because Dr Who was NOT designed to play down or talk down ("dumb down") to its audience. Pertwee's run led to tags of "Dr Wow!", "Dr Phew!" and more.
Tom Baker's Dr Who. Very -VERY- far from being a kiddy show. Was it Genesis of the Daleks where he had to debate with himself whether he had the right, was it morally right to exterminate an entire race -even Daleks- before they were born? That old time travel question of "If you could go back and kill Hitler while he was a baby/child would you? Could you? -a whole new spin. Yes, a "kiddy" tv show was talking about racial genocide.
Have any of these moronic critics even watched the series since it was reintroduced with Christopher Eccleston as Dr Who???? I do not think they have. Matt Smith was okay but I think Moffat let things slide into fantasy more than its science fiction based origins. Nothing wrong with that but stories and scripts have left more questions and continuity gaps than ever before. That is poor writing and management of the series.
With David Tennant there were some VERY dark stories and scenes but it was not what caused me to become indifferent to the series. What did that was Russell T. Davies who seemed to go over the top on two aspects. 1) was basically shoving gay characters and scenes in the viewers face. No problem with gay characters since "being gay" is as natural as being heterosexual but it often got done with a frying pan to the face.
It never helped that some episodes saw the most ridiculous slap stick behaviour by Tennant -the Agatha Christie one springs to mind where Who is poisoned and a slap-stick routine follows and includes burping and farting. Then we had dark, moody, menacing.....then slap-stick....and so on and so on.
2) was that Davies, even Moffatt now, did not seem to be able to write a straight forward ending. Story over and then twenty minutes of the Dr saying goodbye or whatever. It was easier to cut off when the story ended. And there was the fact that Davies wrote Mills & Boon (pap romantic novel publishers) scripts. "Will he?" "Will she?" "Can they?" "Will it be unrequited love?" Seriously, it got vomitable at times and if I ever hear the name "Rose" mentioned again!!! Oh, River Song -love Alex Kingston but her character had so many continuity problems I almost fainted!
Why are ratings low? I think the stories. The acting from the lead characters is excellent BUT you get guest actors such as Hermione Norris and she is basically just there as "fluff": "Oh, you're an alien? You are taking charge? Okay." That whole "Moon Is An Egg" episode was just inane. ******** awful. A story from a 1950s childrens' fantasy book maybe. You got a blurry look from Earth of the Moon becoming "something" but don't panic because it just laid a new Moon. oh my. The Earth becomes a forest and well fed zoo animals start stalking children -reinforcing a negative image of wolves yet again. But when it is all over....no building damage, no burst water or sewage pipes, no animals being cornered and shot as a menace to the public......nothing -yet huge trees had sprung up everywhere????
And Moffatt, who used to be a major league Whovian (remember what happened to comics when fans got to edit them?) shows disdain for "fat couch potato fans". Also, there is literally nothing on UK TV these days. Soaps, soaps, "reality" (fake) programmes and the nostalgic "wasn't the Victorian era really great: everyone knew their place" TV series. No, they were not great. It's a constant diet of pap trash TV. So ratings are very low (the TV puppet show Sooty used to get 16 million viewers a week at its height back in the 1980s) and that is why dvd sales have increased.
Look at Christmas TV -the same films and programmes were basically shown and re-shown and are STILL being shown. All pap. So, WHY did Dr Who not get higher ratings? I know a lot of fans baulked at Father Christmas appearing -they had no idea about the story or how Father Christmas fitted in but assumed the negative. I think the Dr 'telegraphed' what was going on when he asked Clara "Do you believe in Father Christmas?" because it was very important.
There is a problem in that many TV shows now do not provide linear stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. Flashbacks are useful but stories running THEN. 36 HOURS LATER. NOW. TEN HOURS AGO. TEN YEARS LATER. NOW.....it is out of hand and shows poor writing. The first couple times it was done it was interesting but again and again and again and again....writers think its a plot device that makes them look clever. It doesn't. It's just very poorwriting.
I can recall newspapers saying Hartnell's, Troughton's and Pertwee's Dr Whos were "far too scary and frightening for children" They said the same about all the later Dr Whos. Pertwee himself once said that the "hiding behind the sofa and peeking out at the TV" when Dr Who was on was part of the fun -look at kids (pre-PC sanitised) fairy tales -or Struwwelpeter book. Pertwee also said that if a parents thought it was to scary all they had to do was turn the channel -with remote controls now you don't even have to get up to do that.
Really, Moffatt needs to just supervise scripts but get a good team of science fiction writers in. That and for the BBC to remember how to make TV.
WHY was Dr Who so popular? Why do adults now aging somewhat have great memories of it? Why was it brought back? Because it NEVER played down to audiences. It never said "We need to not make it scary" -scary is what made Dr Who. You take the scary out of Dr Who it is like castrating an animal...it loses "something".
So, critics, know your facts about a programme before taking to your keyboards. All you are doing is showing how ******* dumb you are. How very little you know about the series or character.
Lobby for better writers and get a life.
ps. and the worst thing is I don't really care about Dr Who any more and besides, I have touched on all of this before. It's nothing new. But everyone ignored it back when I posted about it!
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