Toby Whithouse's writing for the show is a cut above the rest and he's up there with the best of the show's writers, including Robert Holmes, Malcolm Hulke, Chris Boucher, Dennis Spooner and Rona Munro. I hope the BBC have the sense to promote him to showrunner when Moffat leaves the show, though I think that mantle will pass to Mark Gatiss given his success co-creating Sherlock with Moffat. I admire Eccleston greatly, and I think he's excellent when exploring some of the darker, more serious aspects of the character, but he looks really out of his element with the slapstick and gross-out humor they wanted him to do. He's a good enough actor to have kept developing the role season after season, and I would have loved to see what he would have done with it, but he tends not to stay long on projects and he sold himself short by only doing one season. I find Tennant immensely irritating to watch and, after some initial progress, he reduced the part down to a handful of mannerisms and acting short-cuts. Smith has both an original take on the character - a socially awkward fish-out-of-water - and a knack for hitting all the character notes from the show's history, not to mention that he's the most talented character actor of the three.
