Doctor Who Was Delayed Until the Fall to Build Excitement

Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Moffat reveals:

"I don't know, on this occasion, that the thinking particularly came from me, actually. I've always been open to anything that shakes [the series] up. I think that decision actually came from the BBC.

"But I've been well up for anything that we can do to shake up the transmission pattern, the way we deliver it to the audience and how long we make the audience wait, simply because that makes Doctor Who an event piece.

"The more Doctor Who becomes a perennial, the faster it starts to die. You've got to shake it up, you've got to keep people on edge and wondering when it will come back.

"Sherlock is the prime example, as far as that goes. Sherlock almost exists on starving its audience. By the time it came back this year, Sherlock was like a rock star re-entering the building!

"So keeping Doctor Who as an event, and never making people feel, 'Oh, it's lovely, reliable old Doctor Who — it'll be on about this time, at that time of year'. Once you start to do that, just slowly, it becomes like any much-loved ornament in your house — ultimately invisible. And I don't want that to ever be the case."

Thus ends a lot of speculation. The delay was not to give more time to produce a special fiftieth anniversary project, allow Moffat to produce a second series of Sherlock, or avoid conflicting with the London Olympics. Like Mad Men, some network executive decided he needed to justify his job by making a “big” decision.

What bugs me about starting the season in the fall rather than airing it this spring as normal is the Christmas special, which usually marks the halfway point between the end of one series and the beginning of another, is now marks the midpoint of the seventh series instead. The timing takes the event element out of the holiday episode. Probably more so this year as Amy and Rory are departing as companions in the episode leading up to Christmas.

On the plus side for the BBC, the network is going to use Olympics to advertise the heck out of Doctor Who. for the record, the Olympics definitely was not a factor in delaying Doctor Who regardless how adamant the skeptics still are. doctor Who normally begins airing in April and has never aired its final episode, split season included, passed July 8. The Olympics do not start until July 27th.