Doctor Who in America

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Doctor Who in America refers to the broadcast history of the long running British science fiction television series Doctor Who in the United States. Please refer to the main article for details on the series itself.

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The beginning

The BBC series was originally sold to television stations in the United States in 1972, with Time-Life Television syndicating selected episodes of Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor. Unfortunately, the series did not do well, despite an interesting write-up some years earlier in TV Guide. Apparently, program directors of the commercial television stations that picked up the Jon Pertwee series did not know that the program was an episodic serial, and so it was constantly being shuffled about in the programming schedules. In 1978, Tom Baker's first four seasons as the Doctor were sold to PBS public broadcasting stations across the United States. This time, though, Time-Life was ready to have the Doctor poised for American consumption, by having stage and screen actor Howard Da Silva read prerecorded prologues and teasers for the next episode which would inform the viewer as to what was going on. To accommodate the teasers (which were made out of clips from the next episode), up to three minutes of original material was cut from each episode. Originally mistaken for a British comedy (along the lines of Doctor in the House, Good Neighbors, Benny Hill, and Monty Python), PBS program planners took the show at face value, but it soon achieved cult status.

In the mid 1980s, as more stations began to show the existing 1960s episodes, Lionheart (the program's American distributor in the 1980s) dispensed with the older Time-Life prints containing the Howard Da Silva narrations. Lionheart also offered stations the choice of the 25-minute episodes, or what some stations termed Whovies. These "omnibus editions", or, "movie versions" as they were also known, edited multi-part serials into a single, feature-length film, by cutting out the opening and closing credits, as well as the recap of the cliffhanger, between episodes. This practice carried into the earliest VHS releases in the U.S. and the UK. It was roundly disliked by many fans and the practice was dropped by the early 1990s.

The program became a part of 1980s geek chic, as popular as Star Trek was in the 1970s. Conventions, personal appearances of cast members and production staff as well as the national airing on PBS of the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors two days before the BBC sealed the success of the program in America. In November 1983, on the weekend after the airing of The Five Doctors, all the actors that had played the Doctor who were still living and some of those who played the Doctor's companions over the series' first two decades on television appeared at a standing-room-only event in Chicago, the start of a Thanksgiving Day weekend celebration that continues annually.

Image:DoctorWhoUSA.jpg In 1986, BBC Enterprises organized the Doctor Who USA Tour, a two-year traveling exhibition of props and memoribilia from the program, showcased in a 48-foot trailer decorated with alien landscapes from the show, as well police box entrances, and a mock-up of the TARDIS interior. Many tour stops included guest appearances from cast members.

National fan organizations sprung up, like the Friends of Doctor Who, the North American Doctor Who Appreciation Society and the Doctor Who Fan Club of America, with the latter planning regional weekend events with an actor headlining the event. Local fan groups also developed, some disbanding when the series ended production, others which are still running. There are two annual conventions in America devoted to the series: Gallifrey One, which takes place in February in the Los Angeles area, and Chicago TARDIS taking place in late November. Although not exclusively devoted to Doctor Who, the Massachusetts-based United Fan Con, a general science fiction convention which takes place in early November, also features at least one or more actors from the Doctor Who series each year.

The statewide PBS chain New Jersey Network was the most enthusiastic on the series, scheduling pre-1970 serials as well as being the first to broadcast the new season on the program in 1985. NJN staff member Eric Luskin hosted and produced three documentaries on the series, the latter a "behind the scenes" look at the production of the 25th anniversary story Silver Nemesis.

Once the series ceased production in 1989, the number of stations carrying Doctor Who naturally dropped, although the program's popularity had been waning in the United States for some years. As most stations were in the practice of purchasing the omnibus "movie versions" of the series rather than the fourteen episodes produced annually in its last four years, stations only received four feature-length stories each January. In the 1990s, fewer PBS stations carried Doctor Who, although a few continued to broadcast the series. In the mid-1990s WXEL in West Palm Beach, Florida aired several episodes never before broadcast in America.

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Later years

National awareness of Doctor Who temporarily increased when the Fox network broadcast a new television movie on May 14 1996. The movie, a co-production between the BBC and Universal Pictures, received a moderate amount of publicity in U.S. media, including a prominent story in TV Guide. The producers of the movie had hoped that it might serve as a "backdoor pilot" for a new series of Doctor Who, but sub-par ratings in the U.S. prevented this hope from being realized. Many reasons are given for the ratings failure of the TV movie, most of which focus on strong, "sweeps" competition from programs on other channels, including a pivotal episode of the popular sitcom Roseanne. However, it failed not just against its competition on the night, but against other movies broadcast in the same time slot in other weeks. It netted about a 5.5 rating, or about a 9-share. Fox's Tuesday Night Movie slot was generally garnering an 11-share during this period.

At the same time, Fox was also broadcasting the dimension-hopping science fiction series Sliders which was facing its own struggles for renewal following average to middling ratings.[1] Coincidentally, Sliders was owned by Universal Pictures, but when it came to supporting one series or another, the studio predictably backed the one that it wholly owned rather than the one it for which it was merely a co-production partner. As a result, when the new Fall schedule was announced, Doctor Who was not on the list.[2] Universal did try to find Doctor Who a home on another broadcast or cable network, but were unsuccessful by the time their relationship expired with the BBC on December 31, 1997.

The television movie was only instance to date of a Doctor Who adventure ever being terrestrially broadcast across the United States at the same time. In fact, until the SciFi Channel aired the 2005 series episode, "Rose", on cable, no other episode had been made available to multiple American markets simultaneously, by any method of legal broadcast.

By the early 2000s, only a small percentage of the 1980s-era tally of PBS stations still carried the program. In late 2004, the BBC began to stop sending any more episodes to PBS stations and not to renew current contracts as they expire. According to a report by the BBC, this is due to negotiations with commercial U.S. networks to broadcast the new series of Doctor Who. This means that PBS stations currently only have their in-house libraries of Doctor Who stories to draw on, and once their contracts end, the series would finally disappear from PBS altogether. As of April 2006, only Maryland Public Television and Iowa Public Television still air the classic series. Recently the BBC has shown a willingness to offer the show to America again, with KBTC & KCKA in Washington picking the show back up at the end of April 2006.

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The new series

In 2005, media reports suggested that the Sci-Fi Channel had expressed interest in the picking up the 2005 series revival, but ultimately did not do so that year. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation subsequently became the only North American broadcaster carrying the program that year, debuting it on April 5, 2005 to strong ratings. The Canadian broadcasts are formatted slightly differently than the UK version, with the addition of commercial breaks, introductions specially taped by Christopher Eccleston (Billie Piper also taped one for the Christmas special) and behind-the-scenes footage during the closing credits (mostly taken from Doctor Who Confidential) in order to pad the 45-minute instalments to fill a 60-minute time-slot. While a few American fans were able to pick up the CBC broadcasts, many resorted to using BitTorrent, other peer-to-peer systems, and USENET news groups to download the episodes of the new series for viewing, due to the lack of a United States broadcaster.

BBC Worldwide announced that the series would be released on Region 1 DVD on February 14, 2006. Initial reports indicated that this release would be limited to Canada, with release in the United States delayed until a U.S. broadcaster could be found. However, on November 30, 2005, the BBC announced that the box set would be available in the United States as well, marking one of the first times a full season of a series would by-pass American television broadcast and go straight to DVD.

On January 10, 2006 it was reported by TV Shows on DVD that the United States DVD release would be delayed. On January 12, 2006 the BBC announced that the DVD release date was now July 4 and that Sci Fi had purchased the broadcast rights to Series 1 with an option for Series 2. (The Canadian release of Series 1 on DVD went ahead as scheduled in February.) Series 1 began airing on March 17, 2006. [3] [4] [5]

The episodes (which appear to run off the same master tapes used in Canada) are edited for time, and for added commercial breaks. With commercials, the total runtime per episode is one hour. In addition, the "Next Time" trailers are edited out in favor of original Sci Fi teasers run on the right two-thirds of the screen while the original credits are "crushed" to the left.

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See also

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External links

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