Ten years on from its original premiere, What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?, will be returning on 22 June 2026.
The What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? series launched ten years ago, with a video looking at a possible alternate universe where the programme was never discontinued in 1989 and instead saw a twenty-seventh season and beyond. This series has continued, in one form or another, for a decade, with many changes and alterations over the years to ensure as much accuracy as possible.
Now for its tenth anniversary, the series will be returning to its roots, with the What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? journey beginning all over again.
From 22 June 2026, WIDWWA fans will be able to watch a brand-new documentary retelling of the first year of the WIDWWA alternate-universe as we find out how Doctor Who managed to avoid cancellation, the production of its twenty-seventh season as well as the casting process for the Eighth Doctor. In the following months, the series will continue, telling Doctor Who‘s alternate production history throughout the 1990s.
Since its very inception, WIDWWA has sought to represent the most accurate possible version of a universe where Doctor Who didn’t end in 1989. As the years have gone on, ever evolving technology has enabled this to happen to increasingly realistic degrees. In fact, the first usage of machine-learning image models (commonly now referred to as ‘AI image generation’) for the series was in 2019, although the technology was in its infancy at the time. This new iteration of WIDWWA will use this technology to the full to realise a world which we have no other way of possibly imagining in such vivid detail. All images have been, and will be, produced locally on a M4 Mac, running the models without any cloud-computing. The models have been uniquely trained and unlikely to be produced to the same standard by anyone else.
Although images will be used in this way, no other aspect of the production of these documentaries will utilise ‘artificial intelligence’. All scripts will be written traditionally, without any aid of a LLM. Likewise all narration will be recorded by a human. There have been previous experimentation in these areas before but results have not been satisfactory.
What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? | Episode One will premiere on YouTube on 22 June 2026, exactly ten years to the day that the original series launched. The continuing series, which has now reached 2023, will officially ‘pause’ but may see further updates in future months or years.
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