New Doctor Who Team "Will Need a Moment"; Moffat Advises Patience

Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: doctor who

New Doctor Who Team "Will Need a Moment"; Moffat Advises Patience

Steven Moffat is confident about the future of Doctor Who, but urges fans to be patient and give the new team time to develop its vision.

Published Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:07:09 -0500
by Ray Flook
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Article Summary

• Steven Moffat says Doctor Who has a future, as the BBC opens the franchise to new production pitches.
• Moffat urges Doctor Who fans to be patient, saying a new creative team will need time to shape its vision.
• The former showrunner is confident Doctor Who will return, and believes the series will come back strong.
• Moffat also shares his writing rule: entertainment comes first, with theme and subtext never eclipsing the story.

While we await word on what the future could hold for Doctor Who, now that the BBC has made the decision to put it out to tender for new production companies to pitch, ex-showrunner and writer Steven Moffat has been doing a nice job of keeping the fans focused on the "bigger picture": the show will have a future – it's just going to take a while. Checking in with Half the Picture, continued along that track – though he added that 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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