Steven Moffat’s TV wasn’t made for these times

polygon.com:

Steven Moffat’s first Doctor Who story, situated near the end of the revived show’s first season, was a perfect blend of horror, adventure, and mystery, with a climax containing one of the show’s purest moments of joy. Watching the episode’s mysterious alien plague reverse course, Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor exclaims “everybody lives” as a crowd of people we were to believe had died were restored to life unharmed. This instance of overt, passionate sentimentalism resonated and in many ways set the tone for its writer’s whole career. A standout even amongst a great season, “The Empty Child” was the first of many stories Moffat would contribute to the new Who, including the now-iconic “Blink.”

It was moments like this that led to Moffat eventually being promoted to showrunner, replacing Russell T Davies and ushering in a new era with Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. At the same time, Moffat was developing a Sherlock Holmes adaptation alongside Doctor Who regular Mark Gatiss. Sherlock would debut in July 2010, a few months after Moffat’s first season as Doctor Who’s showrunner premiered. The two shows ran parallel for the next seven years, riding and powering a wave of Anglophilia that had become incredibly trendy, and launching Steven Moffat to the kind of notoriety that few TV writers achieve. But it’s 2012 — the year Sherlock’s second season and Doctor Who’s seventh were released — that feels most representative of what was to come, a future that Moffat would be very much a part of ushering in and left behind by.

It would be an understatement to say that 2012 was a very different time on any axis, but the media landscape of a decade ago is starkly different than today, with not only different stories and stars