{"id":208,"date":"2012-01-31T11:41:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T16:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/?p=208"},"modified":"2012-01-31T11:41:35","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T16:41:35","slug":"doctor-whos-difference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/?p=208","title":{"rendered":"Doctor Who’s Difference"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just stumbled upon this post<\/a>\u00a0from American media scholar (and big Doctor Who<\/em> fan) Derek Kompare, which fits perfectly with our Doctor Who<\/em> discussions:<\/p>\n

“We Americans tend to fall in love with Doctor Who<\/em> for not being American television. American television can\u2019t fathom whimsy. It can barely handle universal, all-ages entertainment any more. Moreover, while there\u2019s no shortage of riveting dramas on American TV today, our expectations are too wired in boring old realism (even in our fantasy series) to allow the kind of \u201cbonkers\u201d tonal range Doctor Who<\/em> thrives in, and too wed to notions of \u201csophistication\u201d to let children in. There\u2019s nothing on American TV that can thread silliness, horror, elation, and heartbreak at the level and speed of Doctor Who<\/em>; we just don\u2019t have a conceptual place for it in our televisual landscape. Joss Whedon\u2019s works (especially Buffy<\/em> and Firefly<\/em>) arguably come close, and other series have certainly had moments (the Hurley episodes of Lost<\/em> come to mind), but they\u2019re all still firmly \u201cadult\u201d television. There\u2019s no home for anything that dares to bridge these gaps of genre, style, and audience age. It\u2019s fair to say that it\u2019s anomalous in this regard on UK TV as well, though to a lesser extent. Thankfully, the megachannel universe is big enough to let Doctor Who<\/em> in, via BBC America, which is making the new run its signature series (though it has long slipped across the Atlantic unofficially via BitTorrent and other means). So far so good for BBC America, which scored a record audience for the season premiere last Saturday. Still, taken as a proportion of the national viewing audience, the series draws about one-fortieth<\/em> the viewers it claims in Britain, where it is one of the BBC\u2019s most popular series, and one of the nation\u2019s most familiar cultural texts. Thus, while I will always love Doctor Who<\/em>, I realize that I have ultimately experienced it as an exoticizing tourist. I regret that I\u2019ll likely never see an American series with as much heart, panache, and unadulterated joy.”<\/p>\n

The comments section also has some great stuff, especially Matt Hills’ input.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just stumbled upon this post\u00a0from American media scholar (and big Doctor Who fan) Derek Kompare, which fits perfectly with our Doctor Who discussions: “We Americans tend to fall in love with Doctor Who for not being American television. American … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/yankswatchingtelly\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}