You’re not entirely wrong though. If you think modern Who bitching about the showrunners is bad, you should have seen it during the John Nathan-Turner years (apart from the very start, where he was seen as a breath of fresh air). New viewers clearly learned from the grizzled veterans. :-)
Curiously, JNT’s was the last era to try the three companion setup, for all of Peter Davison’s run apart from the final couple of stories, as the cast turnover took place. It didn’t work any better then. At least one of the companions always seemed to get left out, and there was one blatant attempt to cope where they concocted an illness for Nyssa at the start of episode 1 and left her to sleep it off for the next three and a half episodes. It can work - it did for the first two years of the show - but that was often done by separating the characters into pairs - mostly Ian+Barbara and Doctor+granddaughter/granddaughter-substitute. Plus in those days the show filmed and aired all year round, so the four person cast gave them the opportunity to write someone out for a couple of weeks for a holiday or if they were sick. When the show dropped down to a less punishing yearly episode count, the cast dropped from 4 to 3. For me that’s probably the optimum number, if done right.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2020-01-15 07:11 pm (UTC)Curiously, JNT’s was the last era to try the three companion setup, for all of Peter Davison’s run apart from the final couple of stories, as the cast turnover took place. It didn’t work any better then. At least one of the companions always seemed to get left out, and there was one blatant attempt to cope where they concocted an illness for Nyssa at the start of episode 1 and left her to sleep it off for the next three and a half episodes. It can work - it did for the first two years of the show - but that was often done by separating the characters into pairs - mostly Ian+Barbara and Doctor+granddaughter/granddaughter-substitute. Plus in those days the show filmed and aired all year round, so the four person cast gave them the opportunity to write someone out for a couple of weeks for a holiday or if they were sick. When the show dropped down to a less punishing yearly episode count, the cast dropped from 4 to 3. For me that’s probably the optimum number, if done right.