An Open Letter to the BBC: Do Not Let J. Michael Straczynski Near Doctor Who

Dear BBC,

You have made a brave decision this week. After years of declining ratings, a failed Disney partnership, a lead actor who quit, and a showrunner who spent his final months calling critics hate-site trolls, you put Doctor Who out to competitive tender. You acknowledged that the show needs a real fresh start. That took institutional courage, and it is the right call.

Now comes the harder part. You need to pick someone different.

J. Michael Straczynski is already campaigning for the job. On Wednesday, hours after your announcement, he posted on X to “respond to the scores of notes online” encouraging him to pursue the showrunner role. He acknowledged the obvious question: would British fans accept an American? He then answered it with characteristic modesty: “I think so.” He added that he would “love nothing more in life than to take on that job, it’d be the thrill of a lifetime.”

He is not a stranger to the conversation. In June 2025, when rumors of RTD’s exit were first circulating, Straczynski was already fielding questions. He told fans then: “Nothing is included or precluded, all options are open.” When asked whether he would consider writing for the show if offered the chance, he replied: “I suppose the question is, would Doctor Who fans be willing to accept an American, even a hardcore anglophile with a UK visa, for such an inherently British series, given Babylon 5 and Sense8 and the like? Would I be worthy?”

He has been positioning for this for over a year. Now that the job is officially open, the positioning has become public.

We are asking you, respectfully and directly: do not do this.

The case for Straczynski rests almost entirely on Babylon 5, the science fiction series he created and largely wrote himself from 1993 to 1998, which we acknowledge is the greatest science fiction show of all time. Nobody is taking Babylon 5 away from him.

But Babylon 5 is thirty years old. The question is not what Straczynski did in 1994. The question is what he has done since, what he believes now, and what he would bring to your franchise in 2027.

The answers are not reassuring.

His most prominent recent credit as a television co-creator is Sense8, the Netflix series he developed with the Wachowski brothers, who now pretend to be women. The show ran from 2015 to 2018. Its central creative identity was explicit LGBTQ sexual content pushed to the limits of what a streaming platform would broadcast. Common Sense Media’s review describes the show’s content as including “frequent sex scenes that include moaning and thrusting, threesomes, orgies, masturbation, and sex toys” with “full nudity shows genitals, breasts, and naked buttocks.” The show’s most discussed scene, in episode six, featured a pansexual orgy involving the main cast. It was so explicit that when Netflix initially canceled the series, a pornography website made a public offer to acquire it and give it a new home, arguing the site’s content standards were a natural fit.

This is the creative work Straczynski cited as his qualification for running Doctor Who.

Doctor Who is a family program. It airs on BBC One on Saturday evenings. Children watch it with their parents. It has been running since 1963 because it is accessible to everyone, not because it caters to adult content platforms. The BBC’s charter obligations exist precisely to protect that identity.

Russell T. Davies did not produce pornography for Doctor Who. He did, however, spend three years pushing the show’s identity politics content as far as the format would allow, declared the show “a gay show,” filled it with drag queen villains and same-sex kisses aggressively foregrounded in marketing, and watched the audience decline from 5.2 million consolidated viewers in Jodie Whittaker’s final series to 3.8 million in the Gatwa era’s last run. The trend was one direction throughout.

Straczynski’s political worldview is not a secret. He moved to the United Kingdom in May 2025. The coverage of that announcement described the move as “presumably motivated by the current Trump administration.” He has used his Captain America comics work, per his own enthusiastic promotion of it, to compare the MAGA movement to 1930s fascism and draw explicit parallels between pre-war American far-right movements and modern conservatism. His social media presence is that of a committed progressive activist who views the current American political environment as an existential threat. He did not move to England to take a holiday. He moved to England because he finds America under its current government intolerable.

That is his right. It is also relevant information for a broadcaster evaluating whether he is the person to steward a beloved national institution toward an audience that includes tens of millions of British viewers who do not share his political framework and are already burnt out from an activist pushing the exact same heavy-handed politics on their beloved show. This is why the ratings cratered.

You need a showrunner who will serve the full audience of Doctor Who, not a fraction of it, whose recent work demonstrates craft rather than political statement. You need someone for whom this show is a creative mission rather than a platform, and someone who will make Doctor Who feel new rather than importing the same progressive framework that RTD already tried, in a slightly different accent.

The show’s problems are the result of a specific creative and political direction that was applied consistently and produced consistent results. Viewership fell every year. The American streaming partner left. The lead actor left. The showrunner is now gone.

Bringing in J. Michael Straczynski means hiring someone whose political convictions are identical to RTD’s, whose most recent notable television work is a show explicitly built around pushing LGBTQ sexual content to network limits, whose planned Babylon 5 reboot has been in “active development” at various studios since 2021 with no pilot produced and no series greenlit, and who has been publicly positioning himself for this job for over a year.

That is not a fresh start. That is the same mistake with a different name on the door.

Doctor Who has a chance right now to be something it has not been in a decade: a show for everyone. The tender process exists so you can find someone who will take that chance seriously. There are writers in Britain, America, and everywhere else who love science fiction, love this franchise, and will not treat its Saturday evening time slot as an opportunity to push an agenda its audience has already rejected.

Find one of them.

Sincerely,

Fandom Pulse

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