Lighter And Softer / Whoniverse

• Doctor Who itself has made tone shifts in a lighter direction several times — sometimes during a Doctor's tenure, sometimes when Doctors were switched out.
  • The seventh season, the Third Doctor's debut in which he was Earthbound and working with UNIT, was quite dark at times, with some brutal fist- and gun-fights, a prickly relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier, one story ending with the Doctor being disgusted by UNIT massacring a group of sentient non-humans who might have been willing to make peace, and another story featuring the Doctor failing to prevent the complete destruction of a parallel Earth. Over the next season, the tone gradually became lighter, with UNIT becoming more Mildly Military, the stories generally having happy endings, and the violence becoming more fantastic.
  • In Season 14, the character of the Fourth Doctor was made Lighter and Softer. The writers gave him more silly setpieces, funny lines and moments where he would be really cute, and fewer terrifying impossibly-old alien bits, debates over the morality of genocide and, well, performing outright murders and laughing about it. The writers apparently did this because they hoped it would let them get away with still inserting as much gore, horror and death as they wanted without facing as much objection from Moral Guardians fooled by the lighter tone. It worked... for a little while, anyway. A good example of a story with this tone is The Robots of Death, which is one of the goriest and most violent stories Tom Baker ever did, but unlike the similarly violent The Deadly Assassin, the Doctor behaves flippantly and childishly about it throughout and the villain is vanquished in a very silly way.
  • The most extreme example comes with Seasons 15-17. Just after the show had reached the height of its "dark and intelligent" phase, it was derailed and audiences were treated to three lighter and softer seasons that verged on comedy. As soon as Philip Hinchcliffe quit as producer his replacement Graham Williams was called in by BBC executives and bluntly ordered to reduce the amount of graphic violence and horror, which had caused high-profile condemnations of the show by moral purity campaigners, led by Mary Whitehouse, and the general press during the previous couple of seasons. The Williams era does have die-hard fans, but most of the child audience seemed to regret the loss of the gore and horror.
  • Season 23 was also the subject of executive edicts demanding that it be made lighter than the very grim and violent previous season. In this case, many fans share the belief that Seasons 21-2 had got too crapsack.
  • Moving on to the revival, debatably the Eleventh Doctor is this to the Tenth. While 'pure horror' episodes are more common in Series 5, the series deals with far less serious themes, and the Doctor is portrayed as a slightly mad gentleman waltzing around the universe as opposed to a shell-shocked veteran riddled with guilt from the murder of his own species. Compare "The End of Time" special (the last episode featuring the Tenth Doctor) to "The Eleventh Hour" (the Eleventh Doctor's first appearance). The Mood Whiplash is massive, although quite well pulled-off. This approach is generally justified by the fact that the writers were aiming to make the show more popular and comprehensible to a younger audience, which it did extremely well without alienating older fans. Series 6 got Denser and Wackier and Darker and Edgier, though, and this was partially responsible for its Seasonal Rot.
  • The Twelfth Doctor's era is Darker and Edgier tonally than Eleven's era was, owing largely to Twelve being a Dark Is Not Evil, Creepy Good Byronic Hero. But while outright Breather Episodes are extremely rare (there are none in Series 9, which climaxes with a Trauma Conga Line that temporarily turns him into a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds), episodes like "Time Heist" and "Last Christmas" balance horror/action elements with substantial comedy and whimsy. And post-Series 9 comes the lightest, wackiest adventure for Twelve yet in "The Husbands of River Song", which has a Bittersweet Ending that nevertheless qualifies as Throw the Dog a Bone.
• The Sarah Jane Adventures is mostly this, but still retains some of the key 'scary' elements that Doctor Who has... it's just more likely to be off screen. Russell T Davies has said "there's still death and despair" but added that there's "more hugs".
• The second series of the spin-off series Torchwood actually airs in two versions, one for adults and one for all-ages (or at least somewhere between PG and 12A). There is little difference in the broadcasts, apart from some removal of swearing and gore, such as Alan Dale's character being shot (the all-ages version omitted the squib going off) in "Reset".