Watching Doctor Who
Through a richly detailed account of fan cultures and media over the over fifty-year history of the show, Watching Doctor Who explores fandom’s changing attitudes towards this much-loved TV series. Why do fans love an episode one year but deride it a decade later? How do fans’ values of Doctor Who change over time? As a show that's featured as part of the shared landscape of home entertainment since the 1960s, Doctor Who helps us understand the changing
nature of notions of ‘value’ and ‘quality’ in popular television. Through a series of in-depth case studies of fan polls and debates, Paul Booth and Craig Owen Jones interrogate the way Doctor Who fans and audiences re-interpret the value of particular episodes, Doctors, companions, and eras of Who.
With a foreword by Paul Cornell.
Paul Booth is Professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Communication at DePaul University, USA. He has published or edited more than ten books, including the Wiley Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (2018); Crossing Fandoms: SuperWhoLock and the Contemporary Fan Audience (2016); Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Board Games as Media (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Craig Owen Jones is a lecturer at San Jose State University, USA, and an Honorary Research Associate at the School of Music and Media, Bangor University, Wales. He has written four books and over 30 articles on TV and film studies, music, history, and literary criticism.