I’ll be honest, I’ve been hard-pressed to care much about the long-running Doctor Who TV show ever since the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith era, when the latter brought his impish charm and vigor to a character that’s been a staple of British popular culture for decades.
No disrespect to Smith’s successors who played future iterations of The Doctor, like Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whitaker, but Smith’s Doctor (Eleven, in the parlance of the show) will always be my favorite. And Moffat, of course, was the perfect writer for him. I suppose, if I’m honest, Smith being The Doctor in place when I first discovered the beloved BBC series might have something to do with it. But it’s not just that; everything during that era, from Rory and Amy Ponds as The Doctor’s sidekicks to unforgettable episodes like Vincent and the Doctor as well Smith’s phenomenal regeneration scene — all of it was note-perfect.
I said all that to say, much to my surprise, I found myself finally excited for a new generation of the show, thanks to the newest iteration of Doctor Who that’s set to premiere on Disney+ on May 10. It’s also, by the way, one of at least two TV shows with perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes critics scores at the moment — both of which we’ll take a closer look at below.
Doctor Who (Disney+)
Can the show recapture some of its past magic? We’ll see, but the Doctor Who trailer above certainly has me feeling hopeful. In it, Ncuti Gatwa makes his auspicious debut as the Fifteenth Doctor — and from what I can tell, it certainly looks like he’s going to bring the kind of boundless madcap energy we expect to see from the character.
His companion, Ruby Sunday, is played by Millie Gibson, and together, they’ll travel across space and time, visiting everything from the Regency era to war-torn worlds in the future. Along the way, traversing the galaxy in The Doctor’s iconic Tardis, they’ll encounter both friends and foes, as well as a “bogeyman” that amounts to The Doctor’s most powerful enemy yet.
Them: The Scare (Prime Video)
Prime Video, meanwhile, has also just released a TV show that likewise has picked up a 100% score from Rotten Tomatoes.
The eight-episode Them: The Scare is actually a continuation of sorts — the series debuted in 2021 with the subtitle Them: The Covenant, and this time around, the story has shifted from focusing on a black family that moves into a white neighborhood in the 1950s to an LAPD detective taking on a murder case with a supernatural tinge in 1991.
According to Prime Video, the story in Them: The Scare focuses on LAPD Homicide Detective Dawn Reeve, who’s assigned to investigate the case of a murdered foster mother. It’s a case so gruesome that it’s shaken even hardened detectives. With a killer on the loose, the city teeters on the edge of chaos — but while Detective Reeve is determined to find the murderer, something “ominous and malevolent” grips her family.
