I watched doctor who season 25 episode 1 "remembrance of the daleks: part 1" for this week's doctor huh bonus episode (this is not an ad for our patreon I promise) and I'm just sitting here like. man. I've been largely enjoying the modern doctor who episodes we've seen, but watching classic doctor who makes me feel like the new doctors are just not characters. from what I've seen! we're objectively watching the show wrong, of course, but it doesn't feel right that I've seen three random episodes of matt smith's eleventh doctor and I just have no god damn impression of his character whatsoever. meanwhile I watched a single 24-minute episode of sylvester mccoy's seventh doctor and I feel like I've picked up on so many cool little things about his personality
there's this one moment where he's trying to talk down a military captain from ordering his men to fire on a dalek, and he gives the captain this tiny smile while his eyes look completely serious, and then when the captain ignores him he immediately stops being friendly and just openly talks about how much he hates humans. that's a fucking character right there! this gives me such a strong impression of the seventh doctor, like he's clearly been doing this for so long and he's masking a growing cynicism with ironic zaniness. that is a character!
I am absolutely not trying to say matt smith isn't a good actor. everyone tells me he's amazing on house of the dragon! but I feel like the writing really lets him down. I've seen three of his episodes so far and all I can say is that he's generally a nice guy and says quirky tumblr things sometimes. his quirkiness doesn't feel like it really folds into his general personality though, he's just a guy who will occasionally say wibby wibby woo woo. if you look up the seventh doctor on wikipedia, the "personality" section has six paragraphs. the eleventh doctor has two and one of them is about stephen moffat acknowledging that he's basically the same as the tenth doctor and calling them "good boyfriends"
admittedly, I didn't get a strong sense of the fifth doctor's personality from the episode we've seen of his. so I don't think it's necessarily a classic vs modern issue. I have very little context for what I've seen so far. but what I do know is that my tumblr dashboard was absolutely dominated with reblogs of matt smith gifs for a lot of my teenage years, and his character's wikipedia article has a flag on the "personality" section that says "needs expansion"