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Ask Slashdot: How/Where To Start Watching Dr. Who?
stinkfish writes "I am a big fan of science fiction, especially good TV science fiction. For some reason Dr. Who is a show I have watched very little of. My question to Slashdot is, whats the best strategy for enjoying this classic show? Looking at the wikipedia page on Dr. who, I see there are 11 Doctors, so is hard to pick a good starting point. If it was just up to me, I would start watching from the very beginning. But I know my wife would not watch a show that dated, though she is a science fiction fan herself and enjoyed a few seasons of Torchwood. So where do I start? Here's an article on this topic; is there more to say?"
First, you need to remember that Doctor Who started life as a children's show. Thus, the first bunch of seasons were very oriented toward the 60s serial audience for children. As a Doctor Who lover, I had to really push myself through the first three doctors worth of shows. That isn't to say that there aren't some really great shows to be found early on, but I can see how it might not be the cup of tea of most viewers.
The show really kicks off with the fourth doctor (Tom Baker), often heralded as the most popular doctor. For a certain generation (such as myself, being around thirty years old), Tom Baker is "the" doctor, kind of the same way that for people around my age think of Ronald Reagan as our concept of what "the" president should look like.
Anyway, I would say Tom Baker is the place to start and if you discover that you have a hunger for even more, you can go back and watch the rest. There's a good chunk of missing content over the first three doctor's, however. There's some beyond the third doctor that is still missing, too, but the most content is missing from early on. Back in the day, the BBC just threw out films in order to make room to store more. And at another point, I believe a fire destroyed a lot of it. Where possible, people have recreated episodes by merging audio recordings with still photos from the set.
Beginning with the 2005 Doctor Who, the show technically had a "reboot". You could reasonably only have ever watched these episodes and nothing before. While it's a reboot, the doctor's still count in order and the chronology of everything still happened. So it's a reboot, but . . . . not really. The tone of the show also changed, dramatically. While the doctor always had companions, it was never a show about a brooding sad doctor alone in the world having one romantic interest after another with all the intrinsic undertones. This puts a lot of fans off. If the early doctor who shows (the first three doctor's, at least) were very oriented toward young children, the latest three doctor's were very oriented toward the female "Lifetime" channel audience (to a degree). I find it a noticeable change, but honestly, I don't have a huge problem with it. I like the additional depth the doctor has grown to have.
Anyway, my advice would best be summarized as:
+ You can get away with just watching the modern Doctor Who.
+ I'd really suggest watching everything beginning with Tom Baker onward.
+ If you're hungry for more, afterward, go back and pick up what you can of the first three doctors.
Then you can add on the rest of the shows, like Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood (none of which I have watched yet, but will, eventually -- I don't know much about them).
As for how to find them? You can find old episodes on Netflix. Not sure how much is there. I'm not sure what the legal status is of the copyright and distribution on the content is, but if you know where to look around, you can find collections of all Doctor Who episodes available to the world on bit torrent. It comes out to 26 seasons and about 750 episodes (none of this including 2005+). I would absolutely love to have some sort of an official collection of every single Doctor Who content out there (they also have lots of books, comics, and radio plays . . . all of which I've owned to some extent over the years, because I'm a raging dork). Unfortunately, I don't know where you can find a lot of the content, commercially, and torrent seems possibly the only way for much of it.