For anyone who’s been watching Doctor Who on BBC America – there are, I believe, minor cuts that are made in the American broadcasts (do we still use the word “broadcasts” for cable? or is it “transmissions”?) by comparison with the British ones; but for this season’s opener, “The Eleventh Hour,” there were major cuts, because in Britain the episode ran twenty minutes longer than a regular episode but the American broadcast/transmission squeezed it into the same time frame as all the others. So if you’ve only seen “The Eleventh Hour” on BBC America, you’ve missed at least twenty minutes of material, and you owe it to yourself to track the episode down online (the Dailymotion version, for example, is complete).
Some of the cut scenes are not only quite good in themselves, but also seem to be setting up important aspects of the season arc; a number of important moments in later episodes (in particular “Flesh and Stone”) make a lot more sense if one has seen the cut scenes.
Incidentally, I’ve found the first two Smith episodes far more engaging on a second viewing than I did initially.
I think it’s a pity that Americans are (as far as I’m aware) unable to pay a subscription that would allow them to access BBC iPlayer.
Different countries not being able to access each other’s websites or view each other’s dvds is a perpetual annoyance. And it’s not obvious to me that it’s all that profitable s strategy.
Take the dvd regions thing. The motivation is supposed to be to sell dvds at different prices in different regions; but that makes sense only if they actually release the dvd in all the regions, which they often don’t — whereupon they lose a bunch of potential customers.
I can understand why the BBC limits iPlayer access as it’s licence fee funded (although you don’t have to be a licence fee payer to watch it in the UK). However, I can’t understand why they don’t move towards a system that would allow people abroad to watch it in exchange for a small fee. Maybe it would be too difficult to enforce, I don’t know.
Here’s a speculation thread about an odd scene in the middle of “Flesh and Stone” (when the Doctor suddenly comes back with a different demeanour and different clothing a few minutes after he left) that turns in part on cut-for-Americans scenes in “The Eleventh Hour.” (Though there’s also a scene toward the end of “Flesh and Stone” — when Amy unexpectedly tries to seduce the Doctor — that comes a little less out of left field in light of the cut-for-Americans “striptease” scene in “The Eleventh Hour.”)