At the moment, the only new Doctor Who content whirling through space and time is an animated series aimed at preschoolers. But the main show, which has been in limbo for months, is finally taking some big steps forward. As fans already knew, the BBC recently put Doctor Who out for competitive tender and is now evaluating bids to determine its next producing partner on the show.
Those proposals were due October 2, and while we won’t get news on who the chosen party is until March of next year, we now have some idea of who’s officially in the running.
According to Deadline, one of the proposals came from Jed Mercurio’s Hat Trick Mercurio. He is a British TV veteran whose shows include Line of Duty and Bodies. The trade writes that “Mercurio is a sci-fi fan and created BBC series Invasion: Earth in the 1990s. He has since become one of the nation’s pre-eminent TV scribes, with credits including Bodyguard and Cardiac Arrest.”
Another production company tied to Line of Duty, World Productions, has also entered the Time Lord bake-off. Reports Deadline, “Sources said that World is effectively spearheading ITV Studios’ efforts to land the contract.”
And there’s also STV Studios, “the production group behind Blue Lights and Criminal Record,” which is eyeing a geographical shift for the show from Wales to Scotland. The company “has made an audacious bid to move the show north of the English border for Season 17. Deadline understands that the company has teamed up with Screen Scotland to table the proposal.”
The trade also notes that BBC Studios’ in-house labels are strongly assumed to be part of the bidding process and emphasizes that it doesn’t have the full list of contenders, so you can expect that there are many more creative teams hoping to get a crack at the TARDIS.
However, Deadline does share a list of folks who passed on the opportunity, including A24 UK, Playground, Mammoth Screen, New Pictures, Big Talk Studios, Expectation, and Quay Street.
You can read what the BBC requested from its tender proposals here; once a winner is picked, new Doctor Who episodes still aren’t expected until 2028 or 2029. And as for who will play the Doctor—and how the new series will pick up the pieces from the way the Fifteenth Doctor’s era ended—well, that’s something we can start speculating about next year.
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