For ‘Doctor Who’ executive producer, there’s no time like the present - Los Angeles Times
It’s a simple thing, but it no doubt explains why Torchwood horks so badly week after week while you still get reasonably good seasons of Doctor Who that are dotted with absolutely amazing episodes. The advantage you have as a writer attacking a Who script without a writer’s room is that finally, finally, finally you can write your fanfic, the fanfic you’ve been planning since you were ten, and no other grand plan will get on your way. You WILL write The Doctor Dances, you WILL write The Family of Blood. The disadvantage is that fans can really only expect true mytharc from a Russell T Davies episode (or from the bits at the beginning and the ends of other people’s episodes that he clearly inserts).
For Torchwood, you have absolutely no background, no lifetime of loving the mythology, so you see writers constantly tackling and re-tackling the same themes. It’s as though when they’re contracted, they’re sent a one-sheet saying, “Torchwood is about sex and death, so anything you write that includes those themes is fine.” Except that it’s not. I’ve never seen a show that is ostensibly about aliens write so damn much about the afterlife. There are ghosts and the living dead and reincarnations and reanimations and on top of that, episodes are strung together so barely as to make character continuity a completely unreasonable thing to expect. It’s so bad that if you watch S1 of Torchwood and then flip to the last three episodes of S3 Who, you’ll be blown the crap away by how differently Captain Jack is written.
& I said “mytharc” up there not just to prove once again that I’ll never really quit The X-Files, but because of all the damn shows I’ve got myself into over the years, Who bears the most resemblance to TXF in that way. Many shows have Monster of the Week episodes and then big sweeps-month changes, but Who and TXF are unique in that their mytharc episodes all connect together to half-explain mostly-not-explain a grand conspiracy/timelord.
That concludes today’s hand-wringing. Doctor Who S4 premieres this weekend; I am so ready for Donna Noble.