Weekend TV

Such a good weekend TV-wise.

Catching up with a new season of The Good Place was a delight. (Provided you could ignore Ted Danson/Michael's attempt at an Australian accent when he was posing as a librarian to help nudge Chidi in the right direction at one crucial moment. It's entirely possible that half a dozen episodes from now we'll discover that there was a reason that accent was that bad.)

But of course the big TV event of the week came this evening when we got the debut of Jodie Whittaker in the Chris Chibnall-as-showrunner era of Doctor Who. I had my doubts, but they were more about Chibnall on the basis of how poor his past efforts at writing for the franchise had been than they were about his choice of an actor to play the lead role in his take on the show. [note]It probably doesn't help that I've never watched a single minute of Broadchurch, and the main Who-adjacent story I associated Chibnall with was Cyberwoman from the first season of Torchwood.[/note]

On the basis of the first episode of the new era, I think it's going to be fine. The first episode spent much of the time showing us what the new Companions are like, which is fair enough, but still left plenty of time for Jodie Whittaker to show us that she's got the chops to give us a memorable Doctor once she's reunited with the TARDIS and she gets a couple more stories under her belt. At this early stage, that's as much as we can reasonably expect.