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.
The BBC series was originally sold to television stations in the United States in 1975, 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 these, 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 1980's, 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 U.K. It was roundly disliked by many fans and the practice was dropped by the early 1990's.
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.
National fan organizations sprung up, like 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 conventions in America devoted to the series: Gallifrey One, which takes place in February and Chicago TARDIS taking place in late November.
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. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that TJ Lubinsky at WXEL in West Palm Beach, Florida resuscitated nationwide interest in the series by broadcasting episodes never before seen and syndicated in America. However, only a small percentage of the 1980s-era tally of PBS stations still carry 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 US networks to broadcast the new series of Doctor Who that started on March 26, 2005. 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 this writing, no announcement has been made as to which network or channel in the United States will broadcast the new series. There were media reports that the Sci-Fi Channel had expressed interest in the series, but rejected it as being "too British". The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is presently the only North American broadcaster carrying the program, debuting it on April 5, 2005 to strong ratings. The Canadian broadcasts are formatted slightly differently than the UK version, with commercial breaks and introductions by series actors added in order to pad the 45-minute instalments to fill a 60-minute time-slot. Due to the lack of a United States broadcaster, many US fans resorted to using BitTorrent, USENET news groups and other peer-to-peer systems to download the episodes of the new series for viewing.
See also
External links
- "American Who", US-based Internet audio magazine on "Doctor Who" (http://www.americanwho.net)
- "Gallifrey One", an annual US "Doctor Who" convention held in February in LA (http://www.gallifreyone.com/gallifrey.php)
- "Chicago TARDIS", an annual US "Doctor Who" convention held on Thanksgiving Weekend in Chicago. (http://www.chicagotardis.com/)