ABSTRACT
Doctor Who (1963–89, 2005–), the longest-running and most successful sf television show of all time (Miller), provides unique insights into how television programming has developed over the last half-century. Soon after its inception it became a multimedia franchise, with comics, books, toys, games, a rebooted series, spin-off series, interactive web content, and so on, as well as cinematic, direct-to-video, televisual, and internet/DVD pornographic film adaptations. 1 Such a proliferation of commercial texts poses particular problems—and opportunities—for adaptation studies, which hitherto has tended to concentrate on the nature of textual transformations between more-or-less canonical texts and their adaptations—a focus that typically loses sight of adaptations and their sources as commodities bound up in the realms of production and consumption. In order to comprehend the work of adaptation, we must first come to terms with the nature of the intellectual, creative labor required by both producers and consumers of textual commodities. That is, we need, as Paul Grainge suggests, to “examine the historically specific conjunctures in which interests and meanings are brought into being and actively negotiated” (8). To do so requires us to pay attention not only to “the diversity of attitudes and practices that exist among consumers, audiences and subordinate social groups,” as has been common in cultural disciplines since the 1980s, but also, “with equal sensitivity to context and complexity,” to “the interests and meanings worked out within the field of cultural production” (8). Thinking about adaptation therefore requires us to consider both the processes by which we make culture out of commodities, and those by which capital is made out of culture.
