Netflix’s ‘Classic Doctor Who’ fail

8 July 2013 Rob Buckley Streaming TV 6 Comments

So I’m looking on my iPad for something to watch on Netflix. Although the golden rule of Netflix still applies – it’ll never have the thing you were actually hoping to watch, but it will have something that you’ll be happy to watch instead – of late, they’ve been getting some good stuff in, so it wasn’t an entirely pointless mission. 

Noticing that it had the Paul McGann Doctor Who TV movie available, I decided to see what other ‘classic Doctor Who‘ Netflix had. Its ‘new Who‘ range is quite extensive, with seemingly everything from Christopher Eccleston onwards in stock. Yet this is what I was presented with when I had a look at its range.

Be warned: if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you might have a brain aneurism.

So let’s take this from the top. First, the creators of Doctor Who. CE Webber, okay (just about), but where’s Donald Wilson?

Next, Netflix has episodes from four seasons listed: seasons 21, 22, 25 and 26. Those would be Peter Davison’s final season, Colin Baker’s first season and Sylvester McCoy’s final two seasons. A quick check of the credits, though, establishes that in fact William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton will be starring in these episodes. Huh.

Netflix also doesn’t give the story titles for individual episodes, just the episode numbers. They also have only one story per season – all of them Dalek stories. With the exception of Remembrance of the Daleks from season 25, none of the episodes have the correct numbers for those seasons, since only Remembrance was the first story in its season.

Moving on, if you look above, you’ll notice that Revelation of the Daleks, which is what the story listed above is actually called, has been chopped up: it originally aired as two 45-minute episodes, but these were chopped in two for sales to some countries. Netflix is certainly not appealing to the purists here.

But lastly, I’ll just highlight the most obvious point: ‘season 26’ actually contains Genesis of the Daleks, a Tom Baker story from season 12.

Quadruple oops. Someone needs to have a word with Netflix’s librarian.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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