My parents were (and still are) fans of British TV. Back in the 80s, PBS aired many shows from across the pond, including Doctor Who. My parents taped quite a few episodes, and I grew up watching them in the 90s. It was like this weird secret show that only my family knew about.
I remember pretending to be a dalek at recess. Who knows what the other kids thought of me. We watched the American TV movie that aired in (I think) 1998. Of course we taped it as well.
Honestly I can’t say I was a fan per se, but the fact nobody else seemed to know about it made it special to me in a way Star Trek and Babylon 5 weren’t.
The 2005 reboot aired a year earlier on CBC before coming to the US in 2006. I was able to watch it thanks to being somewhere that had CBC as a cable channel. I ended up bouncing off the series pretty hard early on. Like I said, I was never a big fan, but the show has a weird nostalgia for me for the reasons stated above.
I’ve always loved it, or at least liked it as a kid. My dad was a huge fan of the show when he was a kid, having amassed a huge collection of serials on VHS, and he’d used them to get me hooked just in time for the reboot. We’d watch every Saturday night like clockwork. I remember being distraught when The Empty Child aired, ended on a cliffhanger, and my local PBS affiliate waited four months to air the followup episode.
I lost active interest in the show sometime during Matt Smith’s run as The Doctor; something about the show’s writing around then didn’t quite sit right. Everything was becoming about The Doctor, always revolving around him, pulling focus away from whatever a given episode was meant to be about, and all these hints were being dropped, presenting questions to the audience that would ultimately go unanswered.
Also, I thought bringing back the Weeping Angels was stupid, before they were made more powerful upon their return.