1: Series 5
2: Series 10
3: Series 4
4: Series 9
5: Series 1
6: Series 6
7: Series 8
8: Series 3
9: Specials
10: Series 2
11: Series 7
1: Series 5
2: Series 10
3: Series 4
4: Series 9
5: Series 1
6: Series 6
7: Series 8
8: Series 3
9: Specials
10: Series 2
11: Series 7
I don’t know if I could pick favorites all the way down like that, because I love them all so much, but my top two would probably have to be Series 6 and then Series 5 or maybe 10.
1: season 4
2: season 1
3: season 2
4: season 3
5: season 5
6: season 7
7: season 10
8: season 8
9: season 6
10: undecided
If we're talking just Modern Who, 1)Season 5,
2)Season 4, 3)Season 9, 4)Season 7, 5)Season 8,
6)Season 6, 7)Season 2, 8)Season 3, 9)Season 10,
9th Doctor got the 1st & worst season.
Also out of curiosity what did you mean by Specials? Were you just referring to all of them outside their respective series, or were you referring to Season 4B which consisted only of specials because of Tennant's back injury?
Not ranking specials just because I don't know how I'd average out the story quality fairly.
1.Series 5 2. Series 6 3. Series 4
4.Series 10 5. Series 2 6. Series 8
7.Series 3
8. Series 7 9.Series 9
10. Series 1
So just modern series:
1. Series 4 (inc specials)
2. Series 10
3. Series 5
4. Series 9
5. Series 3
6. Series 2
7. Series 6
8. Series 1
9. Series 7
10. Series 8
S4
S5
S9
S1
S10
S7
S6
S3
S8
S2
Wow. This one is a tough ask.
For my own personal pleasure, I dunno that I can divorce the storytelling into production series like that. No series is faultless enough to be an unambiguous favourite — or one that I won't ever touch again.
It's more, to me, that the storytelling ebbs and flows, without particular regard for series boundaries. For instance, I think that everything from "Father's Day" to "The Girl in the Fireplace" was stellar. I was completely on-board the whole time. That's basically a "series" (of the 2018 length, anyway), but it's split across two Doctors.
The production series 4 is a massive, sprawling thing from "Time Crash" to "The End of Time", and it has mini-runs within it that are great — like "The Unicorn and the Wasp" through "Journey's End" — but the holiday specials are both plentiful and disappointing in this period. So it makes me hesitate to rank S4 as a whole.
Then there's the case of Series 7, which really isn't much of a unified "series" at all. To me, the key aspect of S7 is the way in which Clara positions Eleven for the 50th anniversary, so that he can get new regenerations in his last episode. Basically, there's the "Clara series" and the "let's get rid of the Ponds series". And I just didn't/don't care about the resolution of the Ponds that much. The 2012 "mini-series" is an act of treading water. But all of a sudden, once the Ponds leave, 2013 is allowed to have narrative ambition again. Even River's return here is much more effective and affecting than it was at the end of 2012. (To be clear, I'm not saying I hate the Ponds or anything remotely like that — merely that S5 and S6 provided what I believe was a complete story for them. S7 is something tacked on that weakened their story, and added nothing of great value to the Eleventh Doctor's story that couldn't have been achieved another way.)
So the most I can do with these questions of ranking series is just admit that I don't consume it the way it's produced. What I want are long stretches of satisfying stories — or at least interesting characters — and it doesn't matter to me whether those stretches align with series boundaries.