I wish they'd return to the old format of 4x25 minute episodes to a story, gives you a chance to actually build some tension and develop characters, but I'm just old fashioned and thats ok :lol
Absolutely not!
First of all, even the best four-parters from the classic series felt like they should have been edited down to about 35-40 minutes. There was a LOT of "filler" in those episodes and I didn't think it "built tension" nor did it "develop characters". Those episodes where a LOT slower and there was a lot of back-and-fourth re-covering old ground just to explain to the audience what they figured out 15 minutes into the first episode. Sneak onto the spaceship, escape the spaceship, get captured and re-brought onto the spaceship only to escape, then re-sneak back on for the final moments.
Second of all, a four-episode block is about equivalent to a 2-part modern episode (time wise) - and we all know how well they do with 2-parters. There's an occasional good 2-part episode, but most of them are single episodes stuffed with extras to increase their length. In the rare moments when there's a GOOD 2-part episode, the extra time usually means they take a nose-dive into some fan-wank territory.
To be perfectly honest, there are plenty of single-part episodes that feel too long.
Let's not even delve into the Tennant "movies"...
Maybe if they had a good season arc similar to "The Key to Time", they could make all 13 episodes seem like one long story, but they haven't had a really good season arc in the New Who - most of the arcs seem merely "tacked on".
Initially, my gut tells me to agree with
Orange_Blend and call for 20-24 episodes, but I'm a little cautious about what we'd get. I would be worried that the quality would suffer and we'd have a higher ratio of "bad" episodes to "good" episodes. I know it's subjective, but, on average, we get 2-3 terrible episodes, 3-4 great episodes, and the rest fall somewhere between "decent" and "good". They would probably be safe upping the number of episodes to 16 though.
Editor's Note: A "bad" episode of Doctor Who is still better than "good" episodes of a lot of other TV shows. I don't want to make it sound like I'm implying the show is terrible, what I am talking about is all relative to Doctor Who itself, not the whole of TV.
