Bad Wolf
how am I only learning this now??? Bad Wolf were so successful making 'The Night Of' & 'His Dark Materials' that HBO & SKY invested, & DOCTOR WHO was to be a BBC / HBO co-production: but then 1 month later SONY bought out Bad Wolf from HBO & SKY... and suddenly the Dr Who broadcast deal was with D+ (presumably because SONY still don't yet have a streaming platform) well, to me, no wonder RTD2 / Gatwa's era, & now the continuation of NuWho2, are in limbo, with the world's two biggest rival production houses, Disney & SONY, attempting to make money out of BBC's DR WHO. no wonder... (for me Daniel Craig's BOND was real-world capitalist-manipulation of essential-resources until SONY [or someone] stepped-in & suddenly Bond is all personal & vengeance & romantic...)
I'm belatedly watching BAD WOLF's 'THE WINTER KING' & i can detect their admirable attempts to make something powerful & grounded as an HBO series would be (it was initially developed for/with HBO) but I also suspect studio-short-cuts & interference, since it became a SONY company & ITV America co-production: there are finesses missing... details, & depths absent that are present in other BW or HBO productions. "cheap" is a weak blanket assessment, but WINTER KING beats rushed, which suggests a restricted daily-shooting budget to me (i've worked enough Shoots both monied & 'budget' to suspect i detect the subtle differences). Similarly, despite everything, I had suspicions about RTD2/NuWho2 during broadcast. Something not immediately visible, because the designs, visuals, SPFX & practical elements were so strong: yet, something unsettled my enjoyment. This is no way an objective assessment of circumstances & outcomes, just the instincts of a 50yr Whovian, but something upset my spidey-sense about NuWho2, & this info, I missed at the time, begins to make sense of things for me. namaste. as you were.