TARDIS Report: Wednesday (US Debut Roundup)

This evening's summation, coverage of the new series' debut in the US:

The Sci-Fi Channel's Schedulebot (the broadcast schedule printed online) has changed slightly, now calling the March 17 9pm premiere "Rose & The End Of The World (2-hr Prem)". The repeats from 11:30PM to 1:30AM on the 19th, 10AM to Noon on the 20th, and Midnight to 2AM late Thursday the 23rd show them as 2 separate episodes, but the debut is listed as a two-hour broadcast.

The channel's Sci Fi Wire has featured two articles today about the new series. The first: "Russell T. Davies, producer of the new Doctor Who, told SCI FI Wire that one of his priorities was to create a series that would be taken seriously as a mainstream drama. The original incarnation, which was canceled by the BBC in the late '80s after 26 seasons, was regarded by some executives as a bit of a joke in later years. 'That's very true,' Davies said in an interview. 'But all of those people are now gone, so I have to say the opposite is now true. Frankly, I have to say, the terrifying thing about this time last year was that we had just spent all that money on it. Doctor Who has a good budget; it's not the biggest budget in the world, but for the BBC to make 13 episodes of something with this sized budget is very rare. I literally can't think of another example, so an awful lot of faith and trust had been put into it. We were also put in the prime-time slot, so expectations were actually massive, and this time last year was truly scary.' Doctor Who premiered in the United Kingdom last year and became a huge hit. 'The interesting thing about when the BBC approached me, I was amazed that they wanted the same thing that I did, which was that they also wanted the series to be on in prime time. You could have done a 9 o'clock, post-watershed version of Doctor Who on BBC2, which is one of our smaller channels, a more niche or elite channel, and that would have created a much more adult Doctor Who, much more like the new Battlestar Galactica, or they could have commissioned something with a much smaller budget for, say, BBC3, which is a wild youth-based channel, in which case, Doctor Who would have been possibly a [bit] Monty Python: very wild and extreme and even a bit radical and much more comedy-based. But I was delighted that they put it on for the primary channel, which is BBC1, on Saturday night.' As it turned out, the vision that Davies had for the series—about an eccentric Time Lord (played by Christopher Eccleston) traveling through time and space, accompanied by companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) in a ship disguised as a police call box—struck an immediate chord when it debuted in its Saturday-night timeslot. 'I know it isn't the same in the States, but in Britain, Saturday night is the ratings war night, in which we play Pop Idol [similar to the U.S. American Idol] and all the big entertainment shows, the Dance Fever shows. It's the biggest battleground of all, so the fact the BBC was investing in it so much by putting it in that prime-time slot very much determined what it should be, which is very much the sort of Doctor Who that I wanted to make anyway, which was a very inclusive version, which would include all sorts of viewers, not just niche science-fiction viewers, but was a great big, bold, wild family drama. So I was lucky that the constellations were in the right shape.' Doctor Who begins its first-season U.S. run on SCI FI Channel starting at 9 p.m. ET/PT on March 17."

The second Sci Fi Wire article, called "Star Was Who Virgin," published this evening: "Christopher Eccleston admitted that he wasn't a big fan of Doctor Who before signing on for the role. 'As a child, I felt that the Doctor was a bit too authoritarian for my taste,' said the actor, whose episodes begin airing on SCI FI Channel at 9 p.m. ET/PT on March 17. 'Because I didn't have a camp sensibility, the wobbly-sets thing made me think, 'Oh, I just don't believe in that!' And [I] ended up watching Star Trek instead. But now I look at the old DVDs, and I've become a massive fan. I think it's a fantastic series, and I'm proud to be part of it.' Eccleston spoke at a news conference last year, before the first season of Doctor Who aired in the United Kingdom. Eccleston is the ninth actor to officially play the Doctor, following in the tradition of William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann. After hearing that producer Russell T. Davies was reviving Doctor Who for the BBC, Eccleston quickly got in touch and asked to be considered for the role. 'I'm a fan of Russell's writing and worked with him on The Second Coming, so I e-mailed him and said, 'When you draw up your audition list, put my name on it.' In a way, it was a crazy thing to do, but I really wanted to work with Russell again.' Eccleston soon discovered that playing the Doctor was a demanding job. 'I think I got away pretty injury-free, but it is a very physical role, and I enjoyed that,' he said. 'Billie Piper [who plays the Doctor's companion, Rose Tyler,] has a lot of the more complicated performance stuff to do in terms of reacting to this extraordinary creature that is the Doctor, but I'm kind of the mental and physical energy. If we rehearsed a scene, often we'd have to find out where he was going to go, which wall he was going to bounce off, and then everybody else would feed off that energy, either undercutting it or topping it. That's why it's such a tiring role, because of that constant balls-of-your-feet acting.' The first 13-episode season of Doctor Who was a ratings success when it first aired in the United Kingdom last year. American viewers will be able to decide for themselves when it begins its SCI FI Channel run. The second season of Doctor Who is currently wrapping up production in the U.K. and will begin airing there in April on BBC1, with David Tennant replacing Eccleston, who left the series at the end of season one."

The San Jose Mercury News has a feature on the new series (which has also been reprinted widely across the country in other newspapers): "As his devoted fans know, Doctor Who always has been capable of a pretty good disappearing act. But the last one he pulled - back on Dec. 6, 1989 - went on a bit longer than expected. On Friday, when the good Doctor starts reappearing in new episodes on the Sci Fi channel (at 10 p.m. EST), it will have been 16 years since the last episode of the original 'Doctor Who,' perhaps the most curious cult classic in the history of television, was produced. Over its first 26 years, the series about an enigmatic time-and-space traveler featured eight very different actors in the lead role, along with wonderfully loopy, 1960s-hip dialogue and some of the worst special effects ever, including aliens made of inflated condoms. A huge hit in Great Britain, 'Doctor Who' didn't surface in this country until the late 1970s, when it became a staple of Saturday night programming on many PBS stations. But despite the pleas of the faithful, there were no new episodes anywhere until last year, when Russell T. Davies, the powerhouse British writer-producer of such shows as the original 'Queer as Folk,' finally persuaded the BBC to let him take a shot at reviving the franchise with some modern twists. Much to the surprise of the BBC, Davies' take on 'Doctor Who' became one of the most-watched series on British TV. (More than 10 million viewers - 40 percent of the audience in Britain - watched the debut, and a second season already has started there.) And now the show returns to America with the 13 episodes that made up Davies' first season on the BBC. The good news for longtime fans is that he hasn't mucked around with the quirky essence of 'Doctor Who' that much, while giving it a more polished look. The Doctor, as he always is referred to in the series, still is the last surviving member of a race wiped out in a time war (don't even ask) and still is going through various dimensions with a goofy grin and a passion for trying to right wrongs. He doesn't always get it right - in earlier episodes, he was partially responsible for Nero's burning of Rome, the Great Fire of London and the appearance of the Loch Ness monster - but he tries. He also still travels with a comely assistant in the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), a space-time craft that's large and comfy inside even if it looks like a 1950s British phone booth on the outside. And his opponents - including Daleks, his longest-running foes - are still the funniest, least-threatening group of bad guys in science fiction history. What has changed is that this Doctor, as played in the first season by Christopher Eccleston from 'Elizabeth' and '28 Days Later,' is more robust and active than his predecessors. His latest assistant, a London shopgirl named Rose Tyler (pop singer Billie Piper), is as much the hero as the Doctor, coming off as Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a British accent. The special effects are computer-generated and state-of-the-art - although part of that art is paying homage to the cheese-ball originals by not making the effects look too good. In Friday's episode, for example, the Doctor battles amusingly robotic department store mannequins and a big blob of pulsating plastic. Best of all, the new episodes (or at least the two that Sci Fi sent out for review) retain the fun of the original 'Doctor Who.' If you're looking for allegorical, intriguing science fiction, this isn't it. If you're OK with rapid-fire, light-hearted dialogue with an occasional dig at politics and culture, this 'Doctor Who' is your cup of tea. Don't get too used to Eccleston as the Doctor, though. The actor bowed out after one year and already has been replaced by David Tennant ('Viva Blackpool' and Barty Crouch Jr. in the most recent 'Harry Potter' film). But even that is in keeping with the show's tradition. Good to see that things are back to what stands for normal in the world of TARDIS, Daleks and Doctor Who."

(Thanks to Paul Engelberg and Benjamin Elliott)