On The Sarah Jane Adventures

The BBC issued a press release today on their upcoming series starring Lis Sladen as former Doctor Who companion Sarah Jane Smith:

Multi-award winning writer Russell T Davies has written a brand new series for CBBC called The Sarah Jane Adventures. It stars one of The Doctor’s most famous companions, investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith.

Russell T Davies says: “Children’s TV has a fine history of fantasy thrillers – I loved them as a kid, and they were the very first things I ever wrote. So it’s brilliant to return to such a vivid and imaginative area of television.”

The series begins with a 60-minute special which will be broadcast in early 2007 with the series due later in the year.

Doctor Who has now become a media franchise with three series in the span of the next twelve months–Doctor Who, and the two spin-offs, Torchwood and now The Sarah Jane Adventures. (A possible third spin-off, Rose Tyler: Earth Defense was cancelled.)

In some ways I think that the spin-off mania we’ve seen–three spin-offs contemplated, two in production, and a possible third-party K-9 series, too–is good for keeping Doctor Who in the public eye, but also bad in that it might be too much too soon and could lead to franchise fatigue, especially with one producer–Russell T. Davies–being involved with all three. Fortunately, the three series are targetting at different audience niches–Doctor Who for all ages, with Torchwood skewing older and Sarah Jane skewing younger–so hard-core Whovians may feel the fatigue while the general audience may not.

Sarah Jane was always my favorite Who companion, and I loved her return in “School Reunion.” Let’s hope that The Sarah Jane Adventures arrives on this side of the Atlantic. 🙂

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

2 thoughts on “On The Sarah Jane Adventures

  1. While Sarah Jane is one of my favorite companions, I agree that this might be a bit much. Over-exposure for the franchise, as well as RTD becoming burnt out can only hasten the end of WHO. And nobody wants that any time soon.

    That’s just my $0.02.

  2. I grew up watching Doctor Who when Lis was in the show as Sarah Jane and it was a really pleasure to meet her in 2006 for a couple of interviews.

    If you haven’t spotted it yet, the last time we met was at the Cult TV Festival held on the Norfolk coast. We talked about School Reunion and the forthcoming Sarah Jane Adventures.

    Full interview can be watched here:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/norfolk/kids/sarah_jane_adventures.shtml

    Hope you like it. All the best for 2007.

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