With the future of Doctor Who up in the air and the BBC’s recent announcement that it would be putting the show out to tender, hoping to find a new production partner after its breakup with Disney+, fans better get used to speculation over who might step up to copilot the TARDIS. There’s been wishful talk about HBO, and both BBC Studios and Electric Entertainment have also been mentioned. But what about one of the biggest streaming powerhouses out there: Amazon Prime Video? Apparently that’s not off the table.
As Deadline reports, the subject came up at the Edinburgh TV Festival, where UK-based Prime Video exec Oliver Jones and Amazon MGM exec Nicole Clemens were asked if the streamer might want to get into the Time Lord business.
“I love Doctor Who, and we welcome any conversations around IP,” Jones said.
Deadline added some context to that admittedly pretty vague remark: “While there’s no indication Prime Video is exploring a deal for the show, many at the festival later remarked the idea had not been dismissed out of hand.”
Jones’ statement came at a time when, as the trade points out, Prime Video is ramping up its production slate in the UK. Just yesterday, we learned that a series based on Stephen King’s London-set Crouch End would become the first King adaptation to be made in the UK.
“We want broadly commercial shows, but they still need to have a sense of authorship, originality, with deep, multi-faceted characters and a real sense of lean and propulsion,” Jones continued. “We’re a local UK team, we’re programming for UK audiences, and we’re programming across all of the regions. Ideally, they also have universal themes, universal subject matters, which mean that they could travel and get bigger audiences.”
It certainly sounds like an environment where Doctor Who could thrive, if at some point in the future it happens to enter the conversation. What do you think about this potential team up?
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