The 2005 reboot is where everyone else will tell you to start because it’s more accessible to today’s audience. And I’m not gonna lie, some of the older series episode arcs from the original run are hard to watch for various reasons. But, if you do decide you’re ready to check out some older Who it matters almost not at all where you start. The sprawling narrative format of the early show is more like a soap opera than Star Trek.

If you can get access to the episodes on demand, the check out the wiki. My old who episodes total about 200GB, but you may find DVD sets of individual specific story arcs at the library. Pick a Doctor or story arc that looks interesting and try them out. Hop around in the Doctor’s timeline. Go check out the introduction of UNIT and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. For the camp, watch a few episodes with K9 his robot dog or Bessie, his hi-tech yellow edwardian roadster. See how awful the original Cybermen and various alien or lizard people costumes are. Who’s this guy in the scarf with the Jelly Babies that everyone’s always talking about? The time lords weren’t always a dead civilization locked away in the Doctor’s backstory, they were the story. As you’re watching the new Who, you may notice other callbacks to people or places in the Doctor’s past, check the wiki and find the original series arc.

My personal suggestion though is to at least give the very first Doctor a real chance. He’s my favorite and not just because of nostalgia. He was way before my time. It’s almost a completely different show. It’s in black and white. Some of the episodes are just missing. But that Doctor is a bit wild in a way the others can’t touch. He has a grand daughter for a companion, not a potential love interest. He’s a snarky, witty, and sometimes mean old man. He lies. You’re not always convinced that he is actually the hero. His series has the first appearance of the Dalek’s and their origin story. The pacing of the earliest episodes seems a bit less sprawling than some of the later series before 2005.