Doctor Who is notorious for behind-the-scenes turmoil, so it's no surprise it's attracted some Executive Meddling over the years.
Classic Series
- Executive Meddling almost stopped the Daleks from ever appearing on Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, one of the several creators of the series and the then-head of drama at The BBC, thought that bug-eyed monsters like the Daleks smacked of lowbrow Sci-Fi rather than the more cerebral Science Fiction approach he wanted. The series' first producer, 28-year-old Verity Lambert, remained steadfast and the Daleks appeared.
- For his part, Newman admitted during an interview years later that opposing the Daleks hadn't been one of his better ideas, contrasting it ironically with his reputation as a "brilliant" TV producer.
- Ironically, a few years later, however, Newman's boss, the head of BBC TV, suggested a 12-episode story featuring the Daleks, allegedly because his mother liked them so much, much to the displeasure of Verity Lambert's replacement, John Wiles.
- Originally the Doctor would merely have a young companion, but that might seem "improper" unless they had a familial relationship, so Susan turned into his granddaughter. Squickily, Ian and Barbara have a conversation about her in the junkyard in the first episode which implies they think he's keeping her locked up and abusing her, and the fact that he's her grandfather makes this implication even worse...
- Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor, is on record as saying the BBC was adamant that there be no indication of "hanky panky" among the occupants of the TARDIS during his time on the show, with them frowning upon the Doctor even so much as hugging anyone. This may have been due to the fact that for most of his time, the Fifth Doctor travelled by himself alongside two sexy (and single) female companions, one of whom was played by an actress about Davison's age and the other supposedly still only a teenager. In the Modern Era, this concern was clearly dropped as the Doctor was allowed to romance (subtly and otherwise) companions and others.
- Peter Grimwade was given such a shopping list of mandates for "Planet of Fire" (use Lanzarote as a location, introduce new companion Peri, write out old companion Turlough and old semi-companion Kamelion, feature the Master and write something that could be his final demise if Anthony Ainley's agent didn't reduce his wage demands to renew his contract) that it's amazing that the story ended up even vaguely coherent and watchable.
- Michael Grade, BBC Controller in the mid-eighties, is the king of Executive Meddling. He openly hated Doctor Who and decided to have the show put on hiatus for 18 months... scrapping pre-production on an entire season of the franchise, including three fully-scripted and partially-cast episodes (after allegedly ordering an outright cancellation of the series). The series was allowed to come back at a drastically reduced episode count (14 episodes at twenty-five minutes each, compared to the 13 45-minute episodes they had the season before the hiatus, and the 26 25-minute episode count of most earlier seasons) and with a lower budget. For years afterwards he claimed that one of the reasons he hated the show due to the lousy effects, despite the fact he could have allocated more money to the show. Eventually, he fired Colin Baker from the role of the Doctor (arguing that he'd been on the show for three years, just like all previous Doctors except for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, but counting the hiatus as part of that time) and forced the producer to recast the role - whilst dating Colin Baker' ex-wife. The series survived to have three more seasons on the air... but Grade placed the show against another network's incredibly-popular series without bothering to note it to the general public... and then the series was put on hiatus one more time in 1989 until the 1996 movie and the 2005 revival series.
- "Survival", the last-broadcast story of the pre-1989 show, had quite a bit of meddling.
- According to Andrew Cartmel, the first draft of the story didn't feature the Master at all, but John Nathan-Turner wanted at least one story in the season to feature an established Rogues Gallery member. On balance, an example that worked out, as the Master's role in the story is believable and in-character, and it gave the series a chance to reverse the Villain Decay that the Master had suffered from in his previous two appearances, in which he largely acted as comic relief to the Doctor's conflicts with new Time Lord villains.
- Sergeant Paterson would originally have been a police rather than an army sergeant, but executives did not want a police officer to be depicted negatively in the show. (A couple of years earlier there had been minor controversy over Lytton's thugs impersonating policemen and murdering people in "Resurrection of the Daleks".)
- Midge's rather unexplained death after the motorcycle chicken duel with the Doctor was due to the originally scripted scene, with the Master inciting the other Cheetah-infected youths to tear him apart for showing weakness, being considered too dark and gruesome.
New Series
- Modern Doctor Who isn't necessarily free of this, by all accounts; it has reportedly been mandated from above that every story must feature some kind of monster, regardless of whether it is appropriate to include one. The episode "Father's Day" was reportedly meant to not include any monsters at all, before this executive decree mandated the inclusion of the Clock Roaches that power the plot. The same rule reportedly led to the introduction of the Krafayis to "Vincent and the Doctor", which Richard Curtis apparently hoped would have been a pure historical; it was finally relaxed in the Twelfth Doctor era.
- The full events remain mysterious, but it's become increasingly clear that there was major conflict between Steven Moffat and BBC executives over the casting and characterisation of the Eleventh Doctor. It seems that the executives were convinced, against all the traditions of the show, that Eleven should be as near-identical to Tennant/Ten as possible, for fear that the mass audience would dislike the new version and give up watching. There may also have been a desire for a second young "sexy" Doctor who could be hyped as a sex symbol. As it turned out, the executives won a battle when Matt Smith was cast, but lost the war when he and Moffat eventually developed the character completely differently. (The biggest piece of evidence to support this is a set of leaked costume-test photos for Smith showing him in a range of very "Hoxton hipster wanker" costumes, including one that looks almost identical to Ten's costume but for the addition of a waistcoat.)
- Even the spin-off media wasn't safe. During the 1989-2005 hiatus, the Doctor Who comics (printed in Doctor Who Magazine) kept moving forward without pause, creating a number of new stories with the Seventh and Eighth Doctors, using original companions, enemies, and so on. note Then suddenly in 2005, Russell T. Davies mandated that all Doctor Who media (comics, novels, short stories, etc.) fall in line with the TV series. Suddenly the writers were forced to use Rose and the Ninth Doctor without any lead-up, requiring they discard a companion (Destrii, an amphibious fish-woman warrior) they'd been developing for several stories without so much as a good-bye while moving onto a character they didn't know very well. The result were a handful of tepid, sloppy stories, rushed to print in the single series that the Ninth Doctor lasted. The Tenth Doctor comics fared quite a bit better, though the "you will use the TV companion" mandate still stands, with the exception of periods with no regular TV companion (Majenta in the Tenth Doctor comics published during the 2009 year of specials, and Jess with the Twelfth Doctor during the companion-less hiatus between Series Nine and Ten).
- This trope narrowly averted shutting down Big Finish's Doctor Who license completely. At an early meeting regarding marketing and spin-off media, the company came up, and RTD could see that the executives were going to reach the conclusion that they should withdraw their license altogether. Davies immediately cut across them to say that they shouldn't worry and they should leave it with him... and did nothing, allowing the company to survive, although he did warn them not to produce anything too family-unfriendly lest they draw the ire of the BBC or the media.
- In 2011, feeling viewers needed an explanation about what the show is about, BBC America required that a pre-credits introduction be added to the North American broadcasts of Series 6. Narrated by Amy Pond, and using flashbacks from Series 5, the sequence quickly explains what the show is about, even though as written it suggests the Doctor is imaginary! Aside from breaking the rhythm of the opening teasers of each episode (which normally lead straight into the credits), the intro was not very popular with viewers who wanted to see the same show the Brits saw. Not surprisingly, the intro is omitted from the Region 1 DVD and Blu-ray releases of Series 6, and was dropped altogether when Series 7 aired. These intros also were broadcast in Australia, and Series 6 episodes on Netflix in North America still display this version of the intro.
- The Doctor Who spin-off series Class (2016) was impacted by meddling. As reported in UK media in the summer of 2016, the BBC required the deletion or toning down of sexual content in the made-for-streaming series before allowing the Doctor to make an appearance in the opening episode. This echoed the fact that the BBC famously would not allow the Doctor to appear at all in the other adult-oriented spin-off Torchwood.
