Getting into Doctor Who with my sons

Sadly, the 8 year old had nightmares after a few episodes. He no longer wants to watch the show. He says he likes the show, but doesn't like the nightmares that follow. I can understand his issue. It had some scary stuff for a 3rd grader.

Bullgrit

I've watched almost all of the new episodes, from the 9th Doctor on, with my daughters (ages 3, 7, and 9), and they got instantly and deeply hooked. My wife was worried that they might be too scary, but it turned out they were just fine, and enjoyed themselves immensely.

Bullgrit said:

Sadly, the 8 year old had nightmares after a few episodes. He no longer wants to watch the show. He says he likes the show, but doesn't like the nightmares that follow. I can understand his issue. It had some scary stuff for a 3rd grader.

Bullgrit

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Which episodes? How far did you get?

If he got as far as The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, that would certainly explain it.

If not, well then it's not going to get any easier I'm afraid.

Yeah, my 7 year old had some bad dreams initially too, but she insisted on continuing to watch the show. She was delighted by it, and eventually the dreams subsided. Mom was still not pleased.

Bullgrit said:

Personally, episode 1 was meh. Mildly interesting, but if it wasn't such a big part of geek culture, I wouldn't bother watching any more myself.

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I am very much with you on this. Me and my wife are the only two people I know who find Doctor Who (20xx era) to be just "OK". Not terrible, not great; often entertaining, but never enthralling. It seems like the rest of the universe is either deeply in love with it, or hasn't heard of it.

Near as I can tell, the problem is that the mix of episodic plot and serial story is almost perfectly wrong to hold my interest. A lot of the individual episodes have interesting ideas and great plots and enemies, but there's always some annoying background long-term character thing going on in the background that detracts from it, and makes it impossible to watch the show randomly (syndication style). On the other side, there's lots of long-term character development plot that is genuinely interesting, but never seems to work for me. The show assumes a level of investment into recurring characters as soon as they're introduced, and I never feel invested as fast as they want me to be. And then every time I actually start getting into a character, that character disappears. It would be infuriating if it didn't make me feel so blase about every new character. I can get into more specific complaints if you don't mind spoilers.

My recommendation is to get through at least a dozen or so episodes before you decide if you like it or not. Don't skip any. See if the pacing works for you. It obviously works great for a lot of people, but certainly doesn't work for everyone.

Also, I would recommend watching any two-part episodes in a single sitting. Some of them are the best episodes of the show, and you really want to watch them straight through. Others (IMNSHO) really have no business being longer than one hour, and you'll want to blast through them as quickly as possible just to get them out of the way and get to the next episode.

Which episodes? How far did you get?

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We saw the first 3 or 4. He enjoyed watching, but when the skin-shedding weird-looking aliens showed up scaring him in his dreams. . . he doesn't want that to happen anymore. And we have enough stuff to do and watch. We may get back to it sometime in the future.

Bullgrit

Love Doctor Who

Hmmm, I wouldn't have thought the Slitheen were that scary. I guess one never knows what will trigger the imagination.