Since 2005, Doctor Who has had a showrunner. This is soembody who has overall creative control of the show. He acts as a combination of executive producer, chief writer, and script editor. He casts the Doctor and companions, plans story arcs, writes the majority of the scripts and edits everybody elses, caand basically has a finger in every pie.
This model comes from the American TV industy, and is popular there, since it's thought that there should be somebody who owns the artisitic vision of a show. However, apart from Doctor Who and its various spinoffs, the showrunner system hasn't really caught on in the UK, and I think there's a good reason for this.
It gives one person too much power.
To see why, let's look at one of the most notorious stories of the 21st Cenury, Love & Monsters. There are many problems with this story, but the biggest one is that it ever got made at all. Why didn't somebody read the script and say, "This is terrible! We're not making it"?
Because Russel T Davis wrote it.
This is a frequent pattern. Clunkers usually have the showrunner's name on them. Writing most of the episodes makes it more likely that they'll write a bad one - not just statistically, but because they're likely to be spreading themselves to thin. Added to this, their episodes aren't subject to independent quality control.
The showrunner's power can also go to their heads. We see this as early as the first season, with the conflict between RTD and Chris Eccleston that lead to Chris leaving after only one season. Russel had refused to Chhis's ideas about how he wanted to play the Doctor. When Chris Chibnall became showrunner, he dispensed with the entire established writing team, reconned the show's entire history, and pursued what seemed to be a petty grudge against Steven Moffat, undoing the 50th Anniversary Special apparently out of spite.
Because the role is so high-profile, showrunners will be tempted to do what they think will please the crowd. However, they'll generally be listening to most vocal elements of the online fan community. Many of their ideas come from the world of fanfic, where there's no quality control and anything goes. The idea of genderflipping the Doctor, or giving him a hithertoo unknown mysterious past as the source of the Time Lord's powers, come from the same type of forum where you'll find Captain Kirk in bed with Mr Spock. In fact, the same type of fanfic-inspired nonsense has afflicted recent series of Star Trek, one of which has as it's protagonist Spock's fully-human adoptive sister, who led the only mutiny on a Starfleet vessel, which was later hushed up. Another element of this was a desire to generate publicity by courting controversy.
When RTD returned for the 60th anniversary, it quickly turned out that he had used up all his good ideas the first time round. Many of his stories drew heavily on his previous work, Lux took its solution from Tooth and Claw, while The Well was a sequel to Midnight. Neither were as good. His main idea seemed to have been "Let's get lots of money by making a deal with Disney!" But all we got for that money was two series of expensive-looking nonsense.
The final problem with the showrunner system is that one man is doing too much. This is why the number of episodes has declined from 13 in 2005 to 8 in 2025. The showrunner is overworked, the audiene are short-changed.
In the 20th Century, the roles of producer and script editor were seperate. The producer was responsible for putting the writers' ideas on screen, and the script editor for applying quality control to them. Technically, a script editor was not supposed to be writing scripts himself, but Douglas Adams sometimes worked round this by writing under a pseudonym.
The new production team should follow this more collegaite structure. As well as a producer and a script editor, there should also be a head writer, who should recruit the writing team, and plan any details such as character development that need to flow from story to story. However, unlike a showrunner, they should be first amongst equals on the writing team, and need not write more scripts personally than anyone else. It should be possible for aspiring writers to submit story outlines, and if they show prommiss, the writers could be invited to develop them further. This would be one way of diversifying the writing pool.
The script editor should review the scripts, suggest any rewrites that are necessary to improve the story or ensure consistency with other stories, and have the power to reject any scripts that aren't good enough. On quality control, the script editor's word in law. Since the script editor isn't one of the writing team, nobody's bad script gets made just because they wrote it.
Once the scripts have been chose, the producer is responsible for getting them on screen. They appoint directors, oversee the rest of the crew, and cast the leads. (Casting guest characters is a job for individual directors).
When it comes to casting the leads, showrunners have generally chosen actors that they personally want to work with. Sometimes it works well - Peter Capaldi, David Tennant. Sometimes it doesn't - Chris Eccleston (as previously mentioned), Jodie Whittaker (all other things being equal, if Chris Chibnall had cast a man as the Doctor, he'd have cast the wrong man). However, Matt Smith was chosen by an open audition. Like Tom Baker, he was pretty much unknown when he was cast, but in 45 minutes of The Eleventh Hour he went from Matt Who? to Matt Doctor Who. Open auditions are, I think, the way to go, for both Doctors and companions.
I'd like to give the leads some creative input. Tom Baker could be a nightmare to work with, but his ideas did bring about improvements to some stories. Famously, in The Face of Evil, he refused to threaten another character with a knife, and add-libbed the classic line "Take me to your leader, or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly-baby! Choose the best actors you can find and then trust them.
Whenever there's a change of personnel on Doctor Who, the press are always speculating, who should the new Doctor be? Who should the new showrunner be? To the first question, my answer is always "the best man for the job" and to the second, my answer is nobody.
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