April 16, 2010
When “Doctor Who” Resembled Church Drama
Posted by Michael in : Writing , trackback
The new season of Doctor Who premieres on BBC America tonight with Matt Smith stepping in to the lead role as the 11th incarnation of the Time Lord who travels the universe in search of adventure. I’ve been a fan of the show since I discovered the classic series on our local PBS station when I was in high school or college. That was when Tom Baker played the eccentric 900-year-old Time Lord. He’s still one of my favorite actors to portray the Doctor.
For those who are unfamiliar with the series, the Doctor is a renegade Time Lord from the planet of Gallifrey. Not content to merely observe events, he explores the universe in a ship that travels through space and time called a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space). His particular TARDIS is stuck in the shape of an old British police box, thanks to a faulty chameleon circuit. The TARDIS is larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
The series premiered in Britain in the 1960s with William Hartnell as the first incarnation of the Doctor. When Hartnell left the series, producers wrote him out by having the Doctor regenerate. They introduced the idea that whenever Time Lords are seriously injured or near death, their bodies heal themselves by regenerating into a new physical form. Therefore, a completely different actor can play the Doctor and add his own mark to the role. The series was canceled in 1989 but resurrected five years ago by Russell T Davies. There was an interesting story about the writing of Doctor Who in the years before its cancellation that made me think that it was a lot like church drama.
A few months ago, Sylvester McCoy created a stir when he claimed in an interview that he and Doctor Who’s writers tried to write scripts to undermine then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. McCoy claimed that Thatcher “was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered.” Frankly, Thatcher may have been scary, but she was never as frightening as a Dalek or even a Cyberman.
McCoy, who was the seventh actor to play the Doctor, took over the role three months after Thatcher’s third election win in 1987. The BBC canceled Doctor Who in 1989, and Thatcher continued in her role until 1990. Apparently, nobody noticed the subversive element in Doctor Who’s stories since the series was bleeding viewers.
This story reminded me of an important element in church drama – one that gets violated all the time. Good drama, whether it’s on a traditional stage or at the church, doesn’t need to preach its message. It’s far more important to tell a great story than to pound a message into someone’s brain with a bat.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of writers in the church think they have to preach a story with a moral. That’s the kind of stuff that bores viewers. These writers remind me of an old episode of The Jetsons, in which Elroy was going to star in a TV show. When his mother, Jane, asked the TV execs what the message of the story was, they quickly made one up. “Be good to your dog, and he won’t bite you,”
Audiences respond to intriguing characters put into difficult or bizarre situation and seeing how they react. The characters don’t even have to make the right decision. It’s OK to tell a story about someone who makes the wrong choice. People get it because we all make wrong choices all the time. They can relate. But that’s another problem with some church drama. Writers believe they have to wrap everything up into a pretty bow and give us a happy ending.
One of my scripts is a great example of that. In Beneath the Smiles, an older deacon discovers that his young protégé was put off by a black family attending their church. He thought they should go to “their own church.” When I submitted the draft to the church, I was pressured to change it because it was too serious. I couldn’t make the changes they wanted, but we ended up doing it as I had written it.
It would have been too forced to make the young man overcome his racism on the spot. It felt right to have him find an excuse to leave the older deacon’s get-together when he learned that the black husband had been invited. Few people overcome the sin of racism with a 180-degree turn. Most Christians change their minds with gradual steps as they respond to the Spirit’s leading. But the temptation was there for me to find a way to make that young man have a big conversion and repent. It would have been an easy way to proclaim the moral of the story, but it wouldn’t have been honest writing.
I’d love to chat more but the Doctor’s TARDIS is calling.
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