He looks too young. This is a major issue with too many shows these days - all the characters have to look like teenagers. The Doctor always worked better as an older, more distinguished character. Of all the Doctors, David Tennant was the youngest one that still carried enough maturity to pull it off, and he did extremely well. Tom Baker of course was the best of them all, but most people would put Tennant in second place. I also thought that Peter Capaldi was superb - I loved the way he portrayed the character as a kind of mature rock star with a degree of flair and flamboyance that many of the other actors have failed to bring to the role.
Jodie Whittaker in particular was a huge let-down. For one thing, she has no love for the show or the character (she admitted this in an interview back in 2018) and also went on to say that she wanted to use the role as "a platform for her political activism" - well there goes half your audience at a single stroke. And then of course the BBC decided to use the idea of a woman playing the Doctor as a strawman to berate their remaining viewers with - (ie. "if you don't like Jodie's Doctor then you're a sexist, istaphobic nazi bigot etc etc etc - all the usual NPC responses that you would expect to see from a bunch of depressive zoomers on twit twat, and not from a publicly-funded national broadcaster)
And this is of course why they have now cast a black actor in the role - just so they can pass off any criticism of the show as simply racism
That's not to suggest that the new guy is not going to be good in the role - I have no knowledge of his talent, good or bad. I think that the fact that probably 90% of the British public have never heard of him is likely to work against him, at least in the short term, until he can put his own stamp on the character (which I hope he will be able to do, rather than doing a low-grade impersonation of David Tennant as Jodie Whittaker did with her awful portrayal of the Doctor - Jodie is a reasonably good actress, but totally miscast in any sort of SF/Fantasy show, and her lack of interest in the show always came ocross in her performance
For the record I have no issues with the Doctor being black (or any other race for that matter) but UI would prefer to see an older actor in the role - someone with charisma and gravitas. My own choice for a black Doctor would be the amazing Don Warrington - he has everything that the character needs - certainly has charisma, his voice carries the necessary authority and gravitas that the character must have, and is able to play the role with the perfect balance of seriousness and humour. I think he would be perfect, but he's 70 years old and the BBC only seems interested in appealing to the tiktok generation these days (despite the fact that 99% of them never watch tv anyway)
Of course the combination of far-left politics from the BBC, woke and preachy storylines, heavily infused with the whole "white man bad" rhetoric has all but decimated the show's audience. The ratings are in the toilet, the merchandise is not selling and is on clearance pretty much everywhere (incidentally, the merch for the previous Doctors is still moving, but anything associated with the Whittaker / Chibnall era is stagnant in the extreme, and it's easy to see why - if you alienate a large proportion of your viewers with pathetic woke ideology, then those viewers are not going to go out and buy the merch - common sense really, but something that seems to elude big corporations who seem to think that a few loud-mouthed weirdos on social media are representative of the public as a whole, which is provably not the case)
I don't have any real hope that this classic show can be saved now, despite Russell T Davies coming back as the showrunner, and the BBC effectively selling the Dr Who franchise to Sony Pictures. While Davies is certainly a very talented writer and showrunner, with a string of highly successful shows under his belt, he's still part of the BBC woke mindset and is unlikely to change direction.
Of course the really big thing among fans of the show is that Davies MUST completely erase and retcon the whole Timeless Children storyline, and set things back as they should be - like they were before Chinballs got his filthy hands on the show. ANY failure in this department and the fans are never going to come back. Davies has one chance, and one chance only, to fix the absolute unmitigated disaster that this show has become over the past 4 or 5 years. As a lifelong fan I hope he does, but I'm not holding my breath
Once you lose your audience - particularly if you push them away by insulting them, calling them names and telling them that you don't want them anymore (yes, the BBC famously said that they didn't want the old audience anymore as they "are mostly bigots with outmoded sensibilities"), then it's going to be VERY hard to tempt them back - in most cases it will be impossible - The Dr Who audience is a shadow of what it once was, and I'm not sure it will ever recover to the sort of viewer ratings that it enjoyed a decade or so ago.
Having said that, I really hope that Davies can fix this mess, but my expectations are so low as to be not even worth discussing anymore
As with all the other entertainment franchises that have been destroyed by far-left political ideology in the last few years (Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, DC - the list goes on and on), Doctor Who is currently unwatchable and frankly is already dead. Kudos to Russell T Davies if he is able to resurrect it, but frankly I think at this point, he's just flogging a dead horse
And as someone who grew up watching this show, that makes me sad
