Is Shearman Dead Wrong About Doctor Who? Or Just Bold Enough to Say It?

Feature by Charlie Matterson.

Few statements can ignite the Doctor Who fandom quite like someone declaring the show ‘dead’, but that is exactly what Robert Shearman recently did. Cue fandom outrage, and even a response from Bad Wolf. Yet amidst the uproar, I could not help wondering: doesn’t he have a point?

Let’s be honest, Shearman did not say anything radical. He simply gave voice to a creeping suspicion many of us have been too polite, or too afraid, to name, that Doctor Who, a show built on perpetual motion, now feels as if it has run into a major stop. Is ‘dead’ too strong a word? Time will tell. But Shearman pointed to something structural, not spiteful, and that deserves a fair response. If you care about this programme, if you live and breathe the messy miracle of it, you have to engage with the argument, not just the outrage.

Some fans took Shearman’s words as pessimism, or even betrayal, especially coming from a writer of his calibre. But delve beyond the clickbait headlines and his meaning becomes clear. What he is identifying is not a lack of love for the show, but a sense that, for the first time, even the spin-offs and expanded universe might struggle to carry the flame forward because of the ambiguity of Series 15’s ending, and the limbo state the show currently finds itself in.

For my money, in light of Ncuti Gatwa abruptly quitting the show, the end of Series 15 needed one simple, fearless beat: the Fifteenth Doctor begins to regenerate, white light blooming, cut to credits. Instead, Billie Piper appeared as… someone. The real question is why that decision was made at all. The pattern of Doctor Who is that it usually passes the baton cleanly.

According to Billie Piper herself, the scene was a last-minute addition, filmed in haste. By all indications, there was no firm plan for what came next. That does not automatically mean it was the wrong move, but it does suggest a decision made from a place of uncertainty rather than vision. If Doctor Who was about to end, Russell T Davies may have wanted it to do so on his terms. And if it continued, he likely wanted to leave an intriguing hook. The result, however, is a paradox: a scene designed to serve two futures, which now complicates both.

If the show does return and Davies is not at the helm, the next showrunner inherits a cliffhanger that is not of their making. They did not choose to cast Billie Piper as the Doctor. They did not choose this ‘is she or isn’t she’ regeneration. Yet they will have to resolve it somehow. Do they confirm her as the next Doctor, or quietly retcon the whole thing? Either way, it adds baggage where there could have been a clean slate instead.

Doctor Who has weathered narrative complexity before. Successive showrunners have often inherited messy continuity, but this moment feels different. The ambiguity is not building towards something, it is a hedge, a pause disguised as a twist. And that is what Shearman, I think, was really pointing to when he said the show feels ‘as dead as we have ever known it’. Not dead because it has been officially cancelled, but because it is caught in a moment it cannot easily move beyond in any medium.

In that sense, Shearman’s words feel less like criticism and more like diagnosis. When Shearman says everything now feels ‘retrogressive’, I think he is lamenting the absence of space for continued storytelling. For over a decade, Doctor Who could continue even during the previous Wilderness Years.

It did not have to be this way. A clean or open-ended regeneration would have left the door wide open, regardless of Disney, ratings, or production politics. It would have been an act of trust in the future. Instead, we got a hesitant half-ending that makes the future harder to write, harder to fund, harder even to imagine.

So is Shearman wrong? I wish he were. I wish I could say the show feels vital and open, that the horizon is clear. At the moment, it does not. It feels as though Doctor Who has quietly admitted its exhaustion, boxed in by uncertain commercial deals and nostalgia bait. But if it is to return, it should do so lighter, freer, and with a future it can once again invent, not inherit.