| The following article is written from an Out of Universe perspective. |
Jane Espenson (born 14 July 1964) was the Franchise Executive and later Executive Supervisor of Television of the Doctor Who franchise, she has been the Showrunner and Co-Showrunner of both Doctor Who and it's spinoff The Elysium and one of the main creative voices, as a Co-Executive Producer on Panopticon. She has more credits that nearly any other member of the Doctor Who Franchise's Production Team, making her one of the most influential people in the franchise's history. She had previously worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and with Ronald D. Moore on Battlestar Galactica and Caprica.
Biography
Prior to Doctor Who
Espenson grew up in Ames, Iowa, and graduated from Ames High School. As a teenager, Espenson found out that M*A*S*H accepted spec scripts without requiring the writer to have industry representation. Though she was not an established writer, she attempted to write a script. She recalls, "It was a disaster. I never sent it. I didn't know the correct format. I didn't know the address of where to send it, and then I thought, they can't really hire me until I finish junior high anyway."
Espenson studied linguistics as an undergraduate and graduate at University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a cognitive linguistics research assistant for George Lakoff, who acknowledged her work on the metaphorical understanding of event structure in English and credited her with recognizing the existence of the phenomenon of location-object duality in metaphors pairs. Lakoff also mentioned her year-long work on the "metaphorical structure of causation" in the acknowledgments section of Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999, ISBN 0-465-05674-1).
While in graduate school, she submitted several spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation as part of a script submission program open to amateur writers; Espenson has referred to the program as the "last open door of show business".
In 1992 Espenson won a spot in the Disney Writing Fellowship, which led to work on a number of sitcoms, including ABC's comedy Dinosaurs and Touchstone Television's short-lived Monty. This was followed by work on the short-lived sitcoms Me and the Boys, and Something So Right. In 1997 she joined the writing staff of Ellen Degeneres's sitcom Ellen.
After years in sitcoms, Espenson decided to switch from comedic to dramatic writing and submitted her sample scripts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In 1998, Espenson joined Mutant Enemy Productions as executive story editor for the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Over the rest of the run of the series, Espenson wrote or co-wrote twenty-three episodes, starting with "Band Candy" and ending with Buffy's penultimate episode, "End of Days". After her role as an executive story editor, she was promoted to co-producer in season four. In the fifth season she was promoted again to producer. She took up the role of supervising producer in the sixth season and was promoted once more to co-executive producer in the final season.
She wrote episodes both humorous (e.g. "Triangle" and "Intervention") and serious (such as "After Life"). Espenson and Drew Goddard co-wrote the seventh-season episode "Conversations with Dead People," for which they won the Hugo Award for Best Short Dramatic Presentation in 2003.
She also co-/wrote several comic book stories for Tales of the Slayers, Tales of the Vampires and Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, the one-shots Jonathan and Reunion and the limited series Haunted.
Espenson joined the crew of Sci Fi's Battlestar Galactica (BSG) just after Battlestar Galactica: Razor, BSG's first television movie, was conceived. As one of BSG's co-executive producers, she worked on every fourth-season episode starting with "He That Believeth in Me"; she was also the writer of "Escape Velocity" and "The Hub" and co-wrote The Face of the Enemy webisodes. Prior to joining the show's staff she wrote one third-season episode and co-wrote another. In August 2008, the Los Angeles Times broke the news that Espenson was the writer behind BSG's second television movie, The Plan, news confirmed in her writer's blog.
Work on Doctor Who
In 2007, Espenson was made a co-executive producer on the Doctor Who spin-off Panopticon. She later in the show's run took the unofficial title of "Chief Staff Writer".
In 2009, Espenson co-wrote the Leftover miniseries End of Days with Russell T Davies.
In 2013, she became a executive producer alongside Ronald D. Moore for Doctor Who, she also served as an executive producer and co-showrunner for The Elysium.
In 2017, Ronald D. Moore was fired by the BBC, forcing Espenson to step in as showrunner for Season 52, before being replaced as showrunner by Adrian Hodges for Season 53 but stayed on as an Executive Producer. She became Franchise Executive at this point, replacing Moore.
In July 2020, Espenson was removed as Franchise Executive, and given the new position of Executive Supervisor for the franchise's television output.
After Doctor Who
To be added.
Personal Life
To be added.
Selected Credits
Writer
Doctor Who
Doctor Who: The New Renegade |
Panopticon |
The Elysium |
Story Writer
The Elysium
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