Doctor Who Season 11 Announces Writing & Directing Crew

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The BBC has revealed the writing and directing crew for Doctor Who season 11. In addition to featuring the first staff writers of color in the time-traveling adventure series' 53-year history, this season will star Jodie Whittaker as the first woman to ever play The Doctor on the small screen.

Since Doctor Who was revived in 2005, The Doctor has been played by four different male white actors (five, counting John Hurt as the "War Doctor" from the show's two-part 50th anniversary special), with first Russell T. Davies then Steven Moffat serving as showrunner. Season 11 will see Chris Chibnail take over as showrunner and reunite the writer/producer (who has already written a half dozen Doctor Who episodes since it was revived) with Whittaker, following the duo's previous collaboration on Chibnail's crime drama series Broadchurch. In addition to casting the first female Doctor, Chibnail has made a concerted effort to assemble an inclusive team of creatives for his debut season as Doctor Who's head honcho.

Chbnail's Doctor Who crew has now been formally unveiled via an official announcement by the BBC. In his own statement regarding the news, Chibnail praises his staff for being a team that hails from "a range of backgrounds, tastes and styles" united by one common trait: they are "awesome people as well as brilliant at their job" who love Doctor Who. You can check out a photo of season 11's writers and directors (which was released as part of the announcement), in the space below.

In addition to the image above, the Doctor Who season 11 writers and directors each released personal statements of their own (which you can read over at the BBC's official website). On the writing side of things, season 11 is being brought to life by a team that includes Malorie Blackman (Pig Heart Boy), Ed Hime (Skins), Pete McTighe (EastEnders, Wentworth Prison), Vinay Patel (Murdered by My Father), and Joy Wilkinson (The Life and Adventures of Nick Nickleby, Doctors). As for the directors: this season features Sallie Aprahamian (EastEnders, The Dumping Ground), Jamie Childs (who helmed Whittaker's video reveal as The Doctor and is working on the BBC's upcoming His Dark Materials TV series), Jennifer Perrott (Doctors, Home and Away), and Mark Tonderai (Black Lightning, Gotham) calling the shots.

As Chibnail noted in his statement, the Doctor Who season 11 creative team is overall welcomingly varied, diverse, and otherwise accomplished in their respective fields. That's all the more encouraging to hear since, as the showrunner discussed at the Doctor Who SDCC panel back in July, season 11 will be less serialized than the show was under either Davies or Moffat's watch. That means each individual episode will be more standalone and, thus, should allow more room for its writer and director to play around with genre and form in the context of the Doctor Who universe. The series ought to be all the fresher and reinvigorated when it finally returns to the airwaves (following a prolonged delay), for it.