Rebranding Doctor Who and reimagining Sherlock : ‘Quality’ television as ‘makeover TV drama’

‘Rebranding’ TV drama and powers of transformation: Doctor Who’s franchise reinventions

Doctor Who has changed many times across its history, both in terms of on-screen content and institutional context. Now managed as a cross-media franchise (Hills, 2010; Porter, 2012a), the series is bigger than any single industry creative. Transition between successive production communities has sometimes aligned with the casting of new lead actors (e.g. the eleventh Doctor’s introduction), sometimes not (e.g. Russell T Davies oversaw the ninth and tenth Doctors). What this means for Who is that ‘world-sharing’ has become more important than ‘world-building’. In Media Franchising Derek Johnson argues that franchises are enabled by their ‘capacity to be shared across a multiplicity of production communities … moving past world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-sharing among creative workers’ (2013: 108–9).

The assumption is that world-sharing results in a coherent narrative universe, but as a consequence of Who’s lengthy existence, it has become ‘an unwieldy skein of texts’ (Britton, 2011: 11). As Piers Britton observes, the programme:

has … often breached its own internal continuity.… Yet … the ‘failure’ of its hyperdiegesis also points to one of Doctor Who’s idiosyncratic strengths: its capacity for the rich and complex accretion of ideas in what amounts to a narrative palimpsest. (2011: 17)

This ‘palimpsest’ has emerged due to different production communities over-writing continuity established by their predecessors. What Johnson would view as textual ‘difference’ allowing ‘production communities to make meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction’ and ‘establish their own unique identities and … creative viewpoints’ (2013: 123) has facilitated a situation where ‘Doctor Who’s hyperdiegetic framework is at best rickety’ (Britton, 2011: 22). Such ‘professional distinction’ has also been heightened by the casting of new Doctors, since the show allows its titular lead role – an alien Time Lord with the ability to ‘regenerate’ – to be played by different actors. As Tulloch and Alvarado have noted, the:

success of the programme (its audience size and longevity) must depend on this other ‘success’ (its tension between novelty and sameness) – the latter’s terms defined according to the ‘good television’ discourse of television professionals … that ‘something similar but different’ is required to re-invigorate a ‘tired’ format. (1983: 63)

Doctor Who’s transformations have typically centred on the Doctor’s different incarnations and assistants: ‘it is the female companions and … actorial expression of the Doctor himself who are regularly expelled in the programme’s search for idiosyncracy and … individualism’ (Tulloch and Alvarado, 1983: 97). Yet it ‘is inherently problematic to imply that the Doctor Who narrative is defined by the imprints of its various transient stars ‘ (Britton, 2011: 12). The show’s ‘individualism’ is inflected by production design and paratexts as well as by its leading actors.

In TV industry terms, re-invigorating a ‘tired’ show means rebranding it, not merely recasting (Johnson, 2012; McNaughton, 2010). Who’s rebrandings have taken in redesigned TARDIS interiors and exteriors (the TARDIS being the Doctor’s craft which travels in space and time). Enemies such as the Daleks have also been redesigned along with revitalized theme music, updated logos and title sequences (Booy, 2012: 68).

Doctor Who’s systematic re-designs – highlighting ‘powers of transformation’ – have often been treated to branding ‘reveals’ in promotional paratexts, with the TARDIS exterior being seen in new Who’s very first TV teaser (1 January 2005) while the interior was heavily featured in a specially shot series one trailer. The new-look 2005 bronze Dalek shell was also featured in official promotional paratexts, though its re-design had already leaked via unofficial paratexts such as fan/paparazzi images taken during location filming. Re-invigorating Doctor Who has meant a display of ‘professional distinction’ on the part of production teams. Not only is Who’s narrative re-oriented as a kind of palimpsest, and its characterization reworked, but the show’s icons are visually reconstructed: it is literally given a new look, discursively connecting it with makeover TV. Exactly like makeover shows, whose iterated ‘reveals’ form a part of predictable formats, Doctor Who’s regular ‘updatings’ have become an expected part of the series where ‘tonal re-inscriptions … are arguably only surprising in the moments in which they occur’ (Britton, 2011: 108).

Drawing on Kristin Thompson’s work (2007: 75), Derek Johnson refers to franchise principles of ‘overdesign’ which sustain ‘world-sharing’ across showrunners, where ‘persistent visual design tradition[s have] emerged’ (2013: 117) in shows such as Star Trek. ‘Overdesigned’ detail in the mise en scene thanks to production design can serve as ‘a resource for later … elaboration’ by successive production communities, although visual style can also be ‘used as a point of differential production identification’ (Johnson, 2013: 119, 136) to textually reinforce the creative vision of new producers. Russell T Davies’s newly designed (2005) TARDIS interior was visualized as an organic entity, whereas the production community linked to Steven Moffat’s tenure initially repositioned the TARDIS as a bricolage of low-tech items (gramophone, typewriter, etc). The Radio Times promoted Moffat’s first series with a fold-out cover displaying this 2010 ‘new Tardis’ as a crucial site of ‘All new Who’, which Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, the new Doctor and companion, would ‘welcome you aboard’ (Radio Times, 2010: 1). This paratext made the transformed TARDIS interior as much of a ‘star’ as the lead actors. Such design work exceeds narrative: it ‘is not entirely to tell the story but to establish … credibility’ (Cubitt, 2008: 190). Yet even more than this, it is a key part of Doctor Who’s brand individuation. As writer Stephen Thompson says of Michael Pickwoad’s recent work on ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’: ‘if we can deliver some nice designs, that’s the star, more than the plot is’ (in Bryher, 2013: 29).

Similarly, Doctor Who Magazine teased readers with a close-up detail of the latest (2012) TARDIS interior alongside the strapline ‘INSIDE THE NEW TARDIS!’ on its ‘Next Issue…’ promotional page (Doctor Who Magazine, 2012: 99). Writing in Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy, Celia Lury points out that branding doesn’t only mean consistent products: ‘the brand progresses … in a series of loops, an ongoing process of … differentiation and … integration’ (2004: 8). The programme brand hence emerges through a series of intervals:

intervals may be organized so as to produce branded products as … different … the ‘response time’ may be organized so as to produce products as fashionable, as a part of a collection, as new or up to date, or sometimes even as an event. (2004: 9)

In terms of new Who’s rebrandings, these intervals are usually constituted as events, as moments where the show is ‘updated’ by a new cast, new logo, new title sequence, new-look TARDIS or Daleks. Showrunners Davies and Moffat can be thought of as ‘control geeks’ (Thompson, 2007: 75) overseeing contemporary design work that often has a glimpsed ‘intermittence’ on-screen rather than necessarily being represented in full detail (Hills, 2011: 47–8). Fan-targeted paratexts can then focus on this glimpsed diegetic detail (Cook, 2013: 14–19).

Doctor Who’s franchise regeneration under Steven Moffat for series 5 (2010) not only involved redesigning the TARDIS, it also set forth a new paradigm of Daleks. The brief for this Dalek transformation was that the incoming production team wanted to ‘make them ours, to revitalize them’ (McKinstry in Berry, 2010). However, this production spectacle is far from passively consumed by fan audiences, who are highly reflexive in relation to the PR narratives surrounding franchise rebranding, including ‘powers of transformation’, brand individuation and design ‘reveals’. The Dalek ‘new paradigm’ was vocally critiqued by fans who detested these ‘horrendous new Teletubby versions’ (Walker, 2012: 126) decrying them as ‘a cynical exercise to sell more products and more toys’ (Collins, 2010: 54). Such was the fannish ‘volatility of responses’ (Britton, 2011: 108) that the cheery tone of Doctor Who Magazine was suspended in favour of debate over the new paradigm’s status. These were said to be ‘[f]at Daleks… like those rides outside shops that children sit in looking all delighted’ (Candon, 2011: 46). These critiques were frequently offered by adult fans: it is unlikely that Who’s multigenerational fandom, including young children, shared such a stance without any contestation, even if the ‘anti-Teletubby Dalek’ position possessed a degree of dominance in fan discourse.

It may be assumed that fans are somehow resistant to any change (Grutchfield in Norton and Rilstone, 2010: 47; Hadoke, 2011: 47), but this isn’t so: Who’s 2005 reimagining was widely celebrated by fans, and each new Doctor and companion since 2005 has been broadly accepted by fandom. Various TARDIS re-designs have also been appreciated by fans. In fact, new paradigm Daleks have proved the most contentious aspect of post-2005 Doctor Who, rejected aesthetically as made up of ‘new and fairly ugly … plastic-looking’ elements (Collins, 2010: 55) and read as infantilized (akin to Teletubbies or kids’ rides). Without fully acknowledging emergent anti-fandom, Doctor Who’s production community has engaged in a branding feedback loop (Lury, 2004: 8–9) by marginalizing the new paradigm, although not dropping them altogether, in 2012’s ‘Asylum of the Daleks’. Now given a metallic look rather than their previous plastic appearance, new paradigm Daleks are displaced by their predecessor Dalek ‘tanks’ from the Davies’ era. Current showrunner Moffat insists this is ‘not a continuity error’ (in Cook, 2012: 19), despite the fact that it effectively scraps plot points from ‘Victory of the Daleks’ and starts over. Likewise, in 2013 US publicity, Entertainment Weekly featured the old-style Davies-era Dalek on one of its collectors’ covers, with the re-sprayed paradigm Dalek relegated to a small interior photo (Collis, 2013: 38).

Fan responses to the Daleks’ 2010 reinvention have thus paralleled Katherine Sender’s findings in her audience study The Makeover. Sender concludes that makeover TV audiences are reflexive and critical, but within limits:

[T]hough people critiqued the advice offered by the show’s hosts, few people challenged the value placed on expertise in the shows. They hated product placement but didn’t comment on consumption as a taken-for-granted method of self-transformation.… [R]eflexivity prompted by the shows seemed recursive, rerouting audiences back into the texts even as they felt mastery over them (2012: 20).

Similarly, although Who fans viscerally disliked the new paradigm Daleks they didn’t challenge the underlying logic of franchise transformation and ‘updating’. And although they sometimes viewed these specific Daleks as excessively commercial, they didn’t question the general merchandising of the show. Sender notes that we ‘assume reflexivity to be such a natural good that its ideological work is overlooked’ (2012: 20).

Makeover TV has been analysed as a ‘pedagogy of consumption’ (Vargas, 2010: 168). By contrast, a ‘prestige/quality’ TV drama like Doctor Who may seem to have little connection with emphases on the consuming body and the insistent iteration of disciplined transformations and ‘reveals’. But as Anthony Elliott has observed, cultural values of reinvention have not been ‘limited to the private sphere … to image and the body’, instead carrying a ‘double-edged coding’ as corporate and personal; institutional and embodied (2013: 9).

Normative values of consumerist ‘updating’ can be coded and glorified via the TV franchise just as much as through images of individual makeover TV participants. The recursive reflexivity of SF TV franchise fans, much like makeover TV ‘fan-experts’ (Sender, 2012: 66), tends to reinforce an acceptance of ‘powers of transformation’, albeit at the brand level rather than in relation to represented selves. And Who fans’ reflexivity naturalizes ‘reveals’ of the re-design labour and ‘professional distinction’ characterizing franchised world-sharing. Icons of Doctor Who are made over, sustaining the TV programme-as-brand and its markers of individuation. Consumerist mirrorings of self and brand can involve questioning specific design changes without querying the systematic rebranding of Who, which instead incites fan anticipation and speculation.

Doctor Who is perhaps unusual given the extent to which it has replaced so many production communities and casts. Jack Bratich has argued that makeover TV is marked not just by the transformation of ‘a single, isolated individual with flexible capacities, but versatility in the position [of participant] itself: the capacity to be replaced’ (2007: 11). Lacking any single authenticating author-function, Who extends the makeover’s ‘capacity to be replaced’ to its stars and showrunners. Though some theorists have been ‘ecumenical’ when defining makeover TV, by suspending generic discourses we might extend ‘makeover modalities’ to revamps of TV franchises themselves as well as revamps of ‘bodies, clothes, rooms’ (Weber, 2009: 27–8). In the following section I will consider the ‘powers of transformation’ enacted by another form of ‘prestige/quality’ TV drama, one that makes over specific characters rather than an entire franchise.

‘Reimagining’ TV drama and powers of transformation: the character reinventions of Sherlock

Sherlock’s situation is very different from that of Doctor Who. Despite their overlapping production staff, Who is a long-running series reinvented through ‘world-sharing’ and shifts in narrative, character and production design. By contrast, Sherlock is a young programme brand, numbering just six stories (across two series) at the time of writing. Yet this newly successful franchise nonetheless represents a further kind of ‘prestige/quality’ TV drama as makeover, since Sherlock modernizes the characters of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (Hills, 2012). Even material drawn from the canon – i.e. stories written by Conan Doyle – takes on a different valence in this context of franchise individuation:

The accompanying text [at website ‘The Science of Deduction’] … tells us that Sherlock Holmes is ‘the world’s only consulting detective’, rearticulating a central premise from the original stories. Here, though, the phrase is elevated to become the franchise’s ‘high concept’, uniting the different iterations of the Sherlock … product.… [S]uch slogans … represent something essential about the premise … associated with the significance of the central character’s individuality. (Harvey, 2012: 126)

Identified with the emergent franchise, Sherlock (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is called upon to display values of quirky individualism and consumer taste (his Spencer Hart suits and Belstaff coat inflecting him as a model of elegant consumption). Resembling an ‘after-body’ in stark contrast to the ‘before-bodies’ of previous Sherlocks, Cumberbatch’s appearance, characterization and attire constitute ‘prestige/quality’ TV drama itself as a form of ‘reveal’, with other versions of Holmes forming an intertextual pantheon of assorted character ‘befores’. Similarly, previous incarnations of the Doctor stand intertexually as former images/selves displaced by the reveal of any new version. In each case, a new Doctor or a new Sherlock ironically promotes an ‘authentic idea of self that is stable, coherent and locatable … transformation is teleological…. Before-bodies become After-bodies, end of story’ (Weber, 2009: 15). Despite multiple Sherlocks existing in successive and concurrent versions – the character being out of copyright – and despite Doctor Who’s many Doctors, each transformation is publicized as teleological. This Sherlock is paratextually positioned as superior to other versions since he stands for original 21st-century modernization. And each new Doctor is presumed to offer newfound relevance/difference for the audience.

However, rather than makeover discourses being drawn on in academic, industrial and journalistic coverage of Sherlock, the show has typically been framed as an ‘adaptation’, with Elizabeth Evans expressing this naturalized reading: ‘It is, obviously, an adaptation of … a revered novelist’s work’ (2012: 114). A range of scholars have explored Sherlock as an adaptation of Conan Doyle’s canon (Lavigne, 2012; Porter, 2012b; Steward, 2012), joining work on the wider intertextualities of Sherlock Holmes’ adaptations (Leitch, 2007). Yet I would argue that Sherlock’s status as an adaptation is less clear-cut than this. The programme doesn’t simply reposition Holmes and Watson as Sherlock and John, figures inhabiting contemporary London. It also displays ‘heretical fidelity’ (Hills, 2012: 34–5) whereby although Conan Doyle’s work is drawn upon, Moffat and Gatiss’s ‘professional distinction’ is strongly emphasized (Johnson, 2013: 123). Though not an ongoing franchise marked by world-sharing, Moffat and Gatiss are clearly aware of wanting to set ‘their’ Sherlock apart from rival versions: this separation forms a key part of the brand’s value. Sherlock was given a preferred ‘pre-image’ by the BBC Press Pack released ahead of series 1 where ‘one of the most important points of the series was the updating of … Holmes’ (Rixon, 2012: 170) as a stylish, internet-savvy but emotionally stunted figure. Though Conan Doyle and Sherlockians are acknowledged in Sherlock’s publicity paratexts, practices of branding hinge on difference:

Whilst the presence of an original literary version of Holmes suggests the potential for consistency amongst screen Holmes to emerge, very different versions actually appear.… [I]nstitutional practice … plays a key role in how Conan Doyle’s template is adapted for each screen iteration. (Evans, 2012: 115)

It is debatable whether ‘adaptation’ is the most productive way of understanding these processes of brand differentiation. The balance in Sherlock’s ‘heretical fidelity’ leans towards heresy: the show is a significant transformation of elements taken from Conan Doyle’s canon, being at best an extremely loose adaptation. For example:

‘The Blind Banker’ [season 1 episode 2] … privileges the series’ generic … affiliations with the episodic police procedural formula.… As such, this episode may well have been given over to [writer Stephen] Thompson and BBC drama conventions to extend the audience beyond Sherlockians. (Steward, 2012: 142)

Miles Booy has distinguished between Doctor Who TV stories ‘adapted’ from other media and those which find ‘inspiration one way or another’ in earlier texts (2012: 177). Adaptation makes sense as a term where there are detailed parallels between iterations, but where the transformative relationship is emphasized then it may be the case that ‘makeover modalities’ (Weber, 2009: 28) are more apt. In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon asks ‘What is not an adaptation?’ (2006: 170), arguing that an ‘extended … revisitation of a particular work’ should be viewed as an adaptation, whereas ‘short intertextual allusions’ would not be counted. Of course, this poses the problem of where ‘allusion’ crosses the line into adaptation. Although Sherlock uses character names and basic relationships drawn from Conan Doyle’s stories (as do Elementary and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes films), it also patches direct intertextual allusions into its storylines (e.g. ‘Rache’ in ‘A Study in Pink’) while at the same time loosely taking ‘inspiration one way or another’ from the scenarios of both Conan Doyle’s stories and other versions of Holmes. It also frequently announces its playful difference from Conan Doyle by utilizing titles which alter those drawn from canon – e.g. ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’, where switching singular for plural (and vice versa) corresponds to a radically reworked narrative. Despite its use of character names and basic relationship patterns, Sherlock often seems closer to Hutcheon’s ‘short intertextual allusions’ rather than ‘extended revisitation’. It becomes a game played with audience knowledge, but also a brand emphasizing its transformative reinventions of Sherlock and John (Harvey, 2012: 127; Marinaro and Thomas, 2012).

Hutcheon also contentiously excludes fan fiction from her account of adaptation (2006: 9, 171; see Tryon, 2012: 178), raising the issue of whether Moffat and Gatiss’s fandom of Sherlock Holmes might further position their work as fannish ‘expansions’ of narrative possibility rather than straightforward ‘adaptations’. Discussing the relevance of fandom to theories of adaptation, Imelda Whelehan ponders whether fans may welcome the ‘opportunity to recapture the experience of a first encounter with the original text in a different formulation. Alternatively, perhaps there are pleasures to be found in … a “version” which appears to iconoclastically demolish the … shaping of the original’ (1999: 16). Whelehan calls for ethnographic study of such issues, yet Sherlock’s paratexts throw up some intriguing evidence to corroborate her speculations.

In the BBC Books’ publication Sherlock: The Casebook, Guy Adams reproduces the show’s favoured PR ‘pre-image’, now a reinforcing co-image for the programme brand:

Many screen adaptations of Doyle’s adventures have been incredibly serious and reverent, and while that might be understandable when dealing with something so highly regarded it can also limit the scope of those adaptations. Good ideas and great characters should be revelled in, not slavishly reproduced. (2012: 2)

Alternative versions of the character are ‘those adaptations’, whereas Sherlock is installed as iconoclastically distinct from its rivals. This notion of evading or demolishing adaptations is also present in a particular form in Steven Moffat’s introduction to the Sherlock-branded release of A Study in Scarlet (Moffat, 2011) where he recounts reading the story as a child:

As I turned that very first page of that very first book, it should have creaked and groaned like a mighty door – because I was entering a world I would never leave. If I’d known everything that was coming, I wouldn’t have been able to lift the pages! The hound on the moor … the despicable Moriarty and the beautiful Irene Adler.… And then Basil Rathbone battling Nazis … and Jeremy Brett bringing theatre dynamite to our dull little televisions. (Moffat, 2011: viii–ix)

And in Sherlock: The Casebook, Moffat again links the process of creating Sherlock to his own childhood experiences of reading, and the ‘first encounter’ posited by Whelehan. Says Moffat: ‘A lot of what we were doing … was thinking about what it felt like when you were a kid first reading those stories.… I wasn’t thinking “Oh, this is all very Victorian.” I was thinking, “How does … [Holmes] do all these deductions?”’ (in Adams, 2012: 3). These promotional accounts seek to ground Sherlock in pre-fandom, prior to any knowledge of rival adaptations and prior to any detailed awareness of canon. All such intertextualities are themselves suspended in Moffat’s self-narratives: he didn’t know about the weight of these things when originally being captivated by Sherlock Holmes. And Sherlock is therefore connotatively released from the burden of pages so freighted with intertextual knowledge that they become too heavy to lift, returned to ‘what it felt like when you were a kid’. Moffat displays his expertise in relation to adaptations (citing Rathbone and Brett) even while dematerializing them in favour of the child’s emotional, untutored responses. Sherlock becomes a modernization that simultaneously reverts not to an ‘original’ text, but to an originary (albeit paratextually narrated) affect.

Brenda Weber’s analysis of makeover TV argues that the genre often displays ‘affective domination’, as participants are at once shamed and supposedly cared for by experts (2009: 30). Relatedly, Sherlock’s use of paratextual showrunner biography – also deployed as a marker of authenticity in the promotional build-up to Moffat’s first episode of Doctor Who as an executive producer (Flett, 2010: 25; see Figure 1) – offers a kind of affective restoration rather than outright domination. Audiences are guided to view intertextual awareness and fan knowledge as less important than their emotional response to the text.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

A young Steven Moffat reads the first Doctor Who novelization, and – not depicted – the very first Sherlock Holmes adventure.

Colin Harvey has argued that ‘[i]n creating … Sherlock, Moffat, Gatiss … and other individuals are negotiating their own subjective experiences … of Conan Doyle’s stories, of other iterations of Sherlock Holmes … with a shared … memory of what Sherlock Holmes is’ (2012: 131). But in these childhood self-narratives, Moffat doesn’t ‘negotiate’ his subjective experiences: he affirms them as dominant over learning about the canon and other versions of Holmes. There is a populist democratization to this discourse of originary affect, since by implication it prioritizes audiences’ untutored emotional responses to Sherlock itself. But affective restoration also downplays notions of adaptation: as long as an initial affect can be recaptured for contemporary audiences then seemingly Sherlock’s precise relationship to the canon is irrelevant. Properly disciplined affect is also stressed in Sherlock’s reinvented characterization: he is narratively established as a figure whose ‘startlingly alien (non)emotional responses … [are] thematized and problematized in the show’ (Coppa, 2012: 217–18).

Moffat’s account of the reception for ‘A Study in Pink’ further stresses instantaneous and proper affect, acting as a narrative counterpart to his own ‘first encounter’ with A Study in Scarlet: ‘people were talking about … [Sherlock] with this … passion. As if they were lifelong fans – when, of course, they’d not seen it 90 minutes ago. Everything had changed in 90 minutes.… Everything’ (in Moran, 2011: 28). ‘Makeover modalities’ are thus threaded through Moffat’s (para-)textual discourses: A Study in Scarlet transformed his childhood self; John transforms Sherlock; and ‘A Study in Pink’ has supposedly transformed audiences so that ‘lifelong’ fandom is indistinguishable from instant fandom. As Anthony Elliott has argued of the cultural logics of reinvention ‘unleashed by new individualism’, these are ‘structured by … major institutional drivers: self-reinvention; instant change; speed or social acceleration’ (2013: 10–11). Moffat’s talk is also highly brand-centred: it is Sherlock which changes everything, in a tale of made over consumers. In fact, many fans of Sherlock engage with a range of fan objects rather than merely responding to this single individuated franchise. On Tumblr fans combine texts with cult followings – e.g. Supernatural, Doctor Who and Sherlock – into their own hybrid ‘SuperWhoLock’ in contravention of brand identities (Perez, 2013). And fans have spliced together footage from Sherlock and the film Maurice (featuring Rupert Graves) within a form of ‘infinite fandom … in which fandoms … feed off multiple other fandoms in an “infinite” continuum … as opposed to … audience activity with a more clearly differentiated focus on specific texts’ (Monk, 2011: 450).

Such transtextuality constitutes an audience-led makeover: these are transformations which, unlike ‘quality TV’ and its institutional parameters, fail to respect normative branding by suspending ‘unities of discourse’ at a textual level. But although fandom’s recombinant transformations may offer a kind of user-generated ‘makeover TV drama’, fan reflexivity still rarely questions the basic principles of franchise rebranding or character reinvention. ‘Prestige/quality’ TV drama is a cultural site that can work just as significantly as makeover TV to naturalize consumer-cultural ‘powers of transformation’.

Individuation remains a touchstone for brands such as Doctor Who and Sherlock: it is not reality TV participants who are being made over here, but long-standing characters and franchises themselves. By restricting debates surrounding ‘makeover modalities’ to one television genre, TV scholars have tended to replay discourses of cultural value – positing a conventional ‘bad object’ and/or defending its audiences. Yet the supposedly ‘good’ objects of ‘quality’ TV drama can also be read as contextualized by, and shot through with, many of the same discourses as ‘makeover TV’. Separating out celebrated TV dramas and denigrated reality TV works to obscure commonalities, especially the naturalization of consumer culture and pedagogies of brand-oriented ‘powers of transformation’. Concepts of ‘updating’ and ‘adaptation’ also work to occlude connections between TV drama and reality TV. However, by suspending the ‘unities of discourse’ linked to makeover TV, it becomes possible to study contemporary programme brands such as Doctor Who and Sherlock as forms of makeover TV drama.