Jodie Whittaker
On 16 July 2017, Whittaker was announced as the Thirteenth Doctor in the science fiction television series "Doctor Who"; she is the first woman to play the title role. She had previously worked with incoming "Doctor Who" showrunner Chris Chibnall on "Broadchurch". She admitted that she had to "tell a lot of lies" after being cast to keep the information secret and used the codeword "Clooney" when talking about the role. She urged fans not to be afraid of her gender, saying ""Doctor Who" represents everything that's exciting about change. The fans have lived through so many changes, and this is only a new, different one, not a fearful one." Chibnall said that he always wanted a woman for the part and that Whittaker was their first choice.
Doctor Who (series 1)
Under producer Davies, the new series had a faster pace than those of the classic series. Rather than four to six-part serials of 25-minute episodes, most of the Ninth Doctor's stories consisted of individual 45-minute episodes, with only three stories out of ten being two-parters. The thirteen episodes were, however, loosely connected in a series-long story arc which brought their disparate threads together in the series finale. Davies took cues from American fantasy television series such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Smallville", most notably "Buffy"s concepts of series-long story arcs and the "Big Bad". Also, like the original series, stories often flowed directly into one another or were linked together in some way. Notably, in common only with the seventh and twenty-sixth seasons of the original series, every story of the season takes place on or near Earth. This fact is directly addressed in the original novel "The Monsters Inside", in which Rose and the Doctor joke about the fact that all their adventures to date have taken place on Earth or on neighbouring space stations.