Well yeah, he did run the show.

Ran it as a bit of a vanity project, almost, really.

He had a lot of good ideas for how to update the series, but just really, really fucked up the implementation.

Of course he had a ton of bad ideas, too.

Still, I'm glad someone brought the series back. And had the sense to put Steven Moffatt in charge afterward.

Moffat has made Doctor Who's resurrection what it should have been in the first place, really.

I think Davies started strong with good intentions but was just too concerned with making Doctor Who something it never was which is a show with universal appeal rather than a show that works better as straight sci-fi strictly for sci-fi fans. Shoehorning in a romance angle in a show that ran for nearly 30 years without one was also pretty stupid.

For all Davies' missteps, he's still the guy who brought "Doctor Who" back, so I find it hard to hate him too much.

Also, I have this feeling that Moffat is best as an occasional contributor and not the executive producer. This past season brought us lots of Moffaty goodness, but he also gave us the space whale who hears childrens' cries, he overused the Weeping Angels to the point that they're no longer unsettling, and with the Pandorica he wasted an episode with a completely telegraphed "twist" ending. (The episode AFTER that was pure gold, but still.)

I think Davies started strong with good intentions but was just too concerned with making Doctor Who something it never was which is a show that could actually succeed in today's television market. I for one am furious that he lifted a dead franchise out of the grave and made it more successful than ever thus ensuring that more people than ever could enjoy it and also discover the old shows as well. How am I supposed to feel special when more than twelve people watch my favorite TV show.

Davies wasn't perfect, but when you complain about him making his show appeal to a wide audience, you're basically dumping on the man for being good at his job.

Whether or not Davies was able to make Doctor Who popular with mass-market appeal means little when, as an actual show with actual plotting, he couldn't even barely tell a coherent story half the time. We got big weeping moments and farting green froggish things and a talking piece of skin - oh, and a burping trash can - but storytelling logic 101 was completely out the window.

How did Rose Tyler's parallel universe dad manage to know exactly when to jump in and grab her? How did the power of all those people thinking about the Doctor happen to undo the Master's aging thingie in Last of the Time Lords? Who the hell read "Love and Monsters" and, contest gimmick or not, really think that the thing should ever see the light of day? Oh wait, it was Davies show to call that shot on, so that's just his own questionable taste in shit once again.

Davies had two really brilliant plot points in his time. One was actually pulling off a sort of real Deus Ex Machina in The Parting of the Ways, and the other how he handled the episode Gridlock, which was really one of his sterling stories.

And, as many would attest, mass appeal doesn't make something good. Michael Bay, anyone? And yeah, I'm a fairly loyal Who nerd since childhood, but objecting to his shitty writing isn't just a nerdish call-out, it's just pointing out that the guy is so into the weeping and the farting and the ass grabbing and whatever else he thinks will be fun to write in he can't even bother to structure coherent plotting. Moffat isn't perfect with that himself. I'm not sure what the Weeping Angels were killing people for in that two-fer, and I'm not sure how River Song didn't lose her memory as well in The Big Bang, but at least Moffat TRIES.

One thing to remember is that Doctor Who isn't -- or wasn't -- a niche show for sci-fi nerds to begin with in the UK; it was a popular show among kids and adults. Even the kids who outgrew the show generally remember it fondly -- it was a very popular, and widely recognized cultural touchstone for decades. Crediting RTD for giving it "universal appeal" is pretty silly.

Holy crap this is as long as the episode. Isn't Doctor Who sort of comedy to begin with?

Anyway, after both the Doctor Who and Torchwood finales I felt like RTD really needs a therapist or something for his depression. He's very good at kind of infuriating endings that destroy the characters you like. I don't know if they get into that in this video though because it's too long to watch.

Not really supposed to be a reply here but whatever.

WORDS! GLORIOUS WORDS!

@Xenocide
Doctor Who wasn't a dying franchise at all. It declined throughout the late 80s because the people at the BBC specifically in charge of funding it and such actively disliked the show so they specifically engineered its demise until eventually not renewing it. Davies didn't revive shit. He was just in the right place at the time time with impressive credentials (namely the success of Second Coming and Jekyll), production on the new Doctor Who began almost INSTANTLY that the actual person who had been responsible for taking Doctor Who off the air finally quit his position at the BBC and stopped blocking revival attempts.

And yes, I'm so disappointed that I can't "feel special" about liking Doctor Who. A show that was watched for 3 decades by millions of fucking people to the point where it is almost inescapably attached to the entire cultural conscious of an entire first world country. Yeah, we're such an exclusive clique.

Davies' best episodes were the ones where he was forced to fit within limitations. When he had carte blanche to make grand sweeping broad stories, he invariably fucked it up and did something that worsened the entire franchise.

Moffat isn't perfect as a writer but I'd still take his worst episode (crying-child space whale) over all but the absolute best Davies episode (Midnight).

Also, Moffat actively did more to revitalize the series than Davies. He did, after all, write The Curse of Fatal Death.